Resource of the Week: Perry-Castañeda Map Collection — Iraq Maps
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor

The wonderful Perry-Castañeda Map Collection at the University of Texas-Austin Libraries has been around for quite awhile. I remember taking advantage of some of the fine resources here via slow dial-up, before broadband Internet access became ubiquitous. I hadn’t been here in awhile, but Gary sent me a link to the site’s collection of Iraq maps the other day, and I was…wowie kazowie…over what I found. You may want to have a look as well.

This really is a one-stop shopping site; not only will you find many different types of maps right here, but links are also provided to related maps all over the Internet. The simple-but-elegant design makes navigation easy. Either scroll down the page till you find something of interest, or use the links at the top to jump to a particular section:

• Country maps
• City maps
• Detailed maps
• Thematic maps
• Historical maps
• Country and thematic maps on other websites

The maps are briefly annotated as to source, date, file size, etc. Most of them are in .jpg format; some are PDFs. An FAQ offers information on viewing and printing the maps, among other things.

Some maps that caught my eye:

• Iraq: Distribution of Ethnoreligious Groups and Major Tribes (from the CIA, 2003; 215 KB)
• A street map of Baghdad (from the USGS National Imagery and Mapping Agency, 2003; 1.5 MB)
• A street map of Tikrit, Saddam’s old stomping ground (USGS/NIMA, 2003; 1.4 MB)
• 1970-era tourist maps of northern (936 KB) and southern (852 KB) Iraq, plus map legend (84 KB). These are from the Iraq Tourism Administration.
• 1953 Iraq Oil Industries map from “Iraq Today. Directorate-General of Propaganda” (272 KB)

The WWII-era maps are particularly interesting, and you’ll see a few maps of Kuwait, Turkey and other nearby locales. You can also find collections of maps for other “hot spots” such as Afghanistan and Iran, plus an extensive collection of bird flu maps.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 1st, 2007 and is filed under Geographic, Resource of the Week, Source File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.