Find yourself with a map...

What can't you find on a map?

I'm one of those people who can spend hours looking at an old map, seeing where rivers start and end, looking for oddly-named towns, and wondering what I'd see if I took one of the little back roads instead of the interstates. Our current government documents display area highlights some of our tangible maps and sources for online maps from the government.

The U.S. government produces a lot of maps, for many different purposes. The Library receives a few of these in paper form that you can check out and use in class presentations, or scan to use in papers. The larger maps in the Library's collection are kept in a special case on the west wall, main floor. Here is more information about this collection, including a complete catalog, as well as links to sources of online maps.

A voluminous collection of smaller maps from the CIA is kept in a notebook in the documents stacks, at this classification number: PREX 3.10/4: . Why am I not surprised that the Central Intelligence Agency is so into maps?

Thousands more maps from government agencies, as well as other cartographic sources, are available online, of course. You can see some of the government sources, and some map examples, if you look at the mini-posters on the end panels of the display.

Sometimes these online maps come with gee-whiz searching and zooming features. An example of this kind of map site is the Library of Congress' American Memory.

The more recent maps we have from the CIA have online equivalents that you can find through the Library's catalog or at this site provided by UT Austin's Perry-Castañeda Library. Here is a small version of the centerpiece map in the display, an extremely informative map of Iraq. (You can see a zoomable larger version of this map here.)


Ask a Reference Librarian for assistance in finding and using the maps and atlases in the Library's collection or online. Get lost—and found—with maps!