• Meet Jim O'Donnell

Benchmarks: People & Jobs

• Judy Russell will retire as Superintendent of Documents.


• The Senate confirmed Mark Myers as USGS Director.


• Our Membership Manager is on leave til December. Here's why!

New Maps of the WAML Region

• September

Articles about Mapping

• Bibliography by Phil Hoehn

Other Map Organization Journals

• Coordinates (MAGERT)
• NEMO Newsletter
• Australian Map Circle
  Newsletter

• Next WAML Meeting in February: Attend this special joint meeting with the California Map Society at the Huntington Library over the President's Day weekend, February 15-18, 2007. The early bird dinner will be Thursday and the field trip will be on Sunday, with the meeting on Friday and Saturday.
  (Note the change from WAML's usual Weds.-Sat. schedule.)
  Check the WAML Meetings page for further information.


• Photos from the fabulous WAML Meeting in Arizona can be viewed at Flickr.


• The Scout Report featured the University of Colorado's "Aerial Photographs of Colorado" web site. Visitors can search or browse these photographs by using a geographic keyword search, and also read the metadata associated with each item.


• The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has closed its specialized library for research on the effects and properties of chemicals, according to documents released by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). [See citation in the Federal Register: September 20, 2006 (Volume 71, Number 182)][Notices] [Page 54986]. The plan to move to an electronic environment is at the EPA Libraries' web site.


• EDUCAUSE published a paper on "Mapping Mashups" - Mapping mashups interoperate with an online mapping service, such as those developed by Google or Yahoo, combining data with the mapping application's locating service.


• As part of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the USGS is tasked with creating a National Geological and Geophysical Data Preservation Program. The Program is envisioned as a national network of cooperating geoscience materials and data repositories that are operated independently yet guided by common standards, procedures, and protocols for metadata.


• Social Explorer, developed at Queens College CUNY, provides easy access to historical census data for the United States through the use of interactive maps and reports.
  They announced the preview release and the addition of seventy years of census data from 1940 to 2000. Social Explorer allows users to visually analyze the demography of any part of the United States through the creation of interactive thematic maps using historical census data.


• RandMcNally is celebrating its 150th anniversary with plans to move into the online mapping arena.

• ALA Midwinter in Seattle: Jan. 19-24, 2007
  A rare ALA meeting on the Left Coast.
• Future WAML Meetings:
  • Pasadena, February 2007 (see above)
  • Denver, October 24-27, 2007
  • Las Vegas, early March 2008
  • San Diego, Fall 2008
• LOEX Call for Proposals: San Diego, May 2007.
  The theme, "Uncharted Waters: Tapping the Depths of Our Community to Enhance Learning", lends itself to talks about innovative partnerships on and off campus that enhance learning opportunities.

• Canadian Librarians mounted a successful challenge to the announcement that as of January 2007, Natural Resources Canada planned to discontinue the printing of paper topographic maps and to close the Canada Map Office. Learn how they did it at the "Maps for Canadians" web site. Heather McAdam, GIS Coordinator at the Maps, Data and Government Information Centre at Carleton University Library (Ottawa) spearheaded the effort.

• On June 1, 2006, the Library of Congress implemented its decision not to create/update series authority records and not to provide controlled series access points in its bibliographic records for resources in series.

Back to top

• The Geography and Map Division at the Library of Congress has announced the placement of the 10,000th map on its Web site at www.loc.gov/rr/geogmap. The milestone comes 10 years after the division started digitizing maps in 1996.
  
• The Broer Map Library announced the addition of 1,300 in 45 states its online collection of historic USGS maps. There is a total of around 2,800 maps online at the site. They will be working to add additional maps to complete certain states.