From the Web Site

Do you want a quick and easy way to see the location of a street address?
Without having to leave the webpage you are on?

Bookmaplet is a free resource. Simply drag the “bookmarklet” to your bookmarks toolbar in your browser. Bookmaplet utilizes Google Maps.

Direct to Bookmaplet

Source: Bookmaplet.com

From the Article:

The data, comprising 1.3 million images, come from a collaboration between the US space agency NASA and the Japanese trade ministry.

The images were taken by Japan’s Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (Aster) aboard the Terra satellite.

The resulting Global Digital Elevation Map covers 99% of the Earth’s surface, and will be free to download and use.

See Also: Sample Images & Access the Data Set (via NASA)

Source: BBC News

This virtual library contains digitized historical maps for all 50 states. Maps at both the state and county level are available. You’ll also find Indian Land Cessions to the United States Treaty Maps. It is a USGenWeb Project.

Source: USDML

Resource of the Week: Historical Aerials
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor

Here’s another time-sink for you. How could you not love this site?

HistoricAerials.com provides free online access to historic and current aerial photography. You can view aerial photography from the 1930s through today. Use our multi-year comparison tools to detect changes in property.

If you just want to look at cool aerial pictures, scroll down to the bottom of the page, to Points of Interest. Click on the Show Categories link. Those who regularly follow us on ResourceShelf know that we kind of got lost looking at aerial pictures of sports stadiums old and new, such as:

• Shibe Park/Connie Mack Stadium, Philadelphia (1970)
• Polo Grounds, New York City (1964)
• Soldier Field, Chicago (2007)
• Candlestick Park, San Francisco (2005)

(We were, however, less than crazy about the fact that after choosing a category to browse and clicking on an image, we were basically bounced out of that category when the large-size image was displayed, and we had to go back and start all over again.)

Of course you’ll want to click on the Oddities category, although right now, there are only four images available — Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch (2005), a blimp and its shadow (1957), Airliner in Flight (2002), and the ever-popular “Boneyard” of mothballed aircraft at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base (2004)

Other imagery categories include: airports, American cities, amusement parks, construction, landmarks, mansions, military, states, Texas, zoos. Some categories have only a few images. Others are stocked with more.

If this was just a collection of static aerial imagery, it wouldn’t be much different from other, similar sites like Bird’s Eye Tourist, for example. But Historical Aerials has a variety of tools that allow you to search for a geographic area, manipulate the images, extract more information from them, and look at images from the same location over a number of different years. A detailed FAQ describes how to do such things as pan, zoom, find latitude/longitude, measure distance, etc. You can choose to overlay roads, counties and cities.

Note from the U.S. map on the home page that historical imagery (back to 1930, in some cases) is available only from certain limited geographic areas — indicated in dark green. “Modern” imagery of the light green areas covers the years 2003-2008. When you initially display an image, labels on the right side indicate which years are available. You can use a slider tool to compare images from two different years.

Note also that the images have the Historical Aerials logo on them. You can purchase logo-free images, which may then be used for publications, etc.

Historical Aerials comes to you from Nationwide Environmental Title Research, LLC (NETR). You may already be familiar with their excellent directory of links to free online public records searches. (They also offer a variety of fee-based public records searches and information.)

From a Blog Post:

On Google Maps, we try to label important places directly on the map tiles. But sometimes, it seems more helpful to just click on a point and ask “What’s here?”. Now you can do exactly that with an option we’ve added under the right-click menu. When you click on “What’s here?”, we give you the most relevant result representing that location, whether it’s a specific address, a natural entity, or a place name.

This feature takes into account the zoom level you’re looking at, and gives you the most appropriate geographical entity at that point. For example, if you’re zoomed in closely on Manhattan, you can get the full address of a point by clicking on “What’s here?”. Additionally, by combining this with the “At this address” feature that you may have seen in the left-hand panel, you can also see a list of the businesses located at that place.

Source: Google LatLong Blog
Hat Tip: Search Engine Land

Word from Google today alerting us that they have just updated their satellite imagery database with new images of Tehran taken on Thursday, June 18th at approximately 11:15 A.M. local time.

You can get a preview via this blog post or view all of the new images using this KML file with Google Earth. The imagery come via the company’s partnership with GeoEye.

The images…were taken from GeoEye’s IKONOS satellite, which images at roughly 1-meter per pixel. We are continuing to work with GeoEye to see if we can provide a higher resolution update from the GeoEye-1 satellite, which would be at 0.5-meters per pixel, but this is subject to weather constraints

You can also find satellite imagery of Tehran via Yahoo Maps (via i-cubed and GeoEye) and Bing Maps (via DigitalGlobe)
.

From an Introductory Article:

Dartmouth’s atlas of health care costs demonstrates a vexing issue facing policymakers: Medicare spends vastly different amounts to care for its enrollees depending on where they live.

Direct to Interactive Map

Source: MSNBC, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Dartmouth Atlas Project

From the Document:

In February, 2009, the Policy and Standards Division (PSD) of the Library of Congress announced the beginning the genre/form project for cartographic materials. As with the previous projects, PSD is reexamining current subject headings and subdivisions to determine whether any changes should be made to their structure and/or to the ways that they are assigned.

PSD is requesting input from the library community regarding a possible change to the structure of most of the form subdivisions in the area of cartography. Provided below is a discussion of the current subdivision structure; the impact that the genre/form project will have on cataloging and resource discovery; and a solution to ameliorate the negative impacts. Comments on PSD’s proposed solution will be accepted through August 10, 2009.

Direct to Full Text (5 pages; PDF)

Source: Library of Congress

Today, we noticed what might be a new feature (at least to us) from Bing Maps. We’ll call it “landmarks to lookout for” while driving. In other words, as you drive the selected route, Bing offers not only offers directions but also selected locations you’ll pass during your drive to help you stay on course. They’ll also tell you if you’ve driven past your destination.

Here are three examples.

1) A drive from Zip Code 10036 (New York City) to Suffern, New York.
Note event #7 on the route. It states that you’ll pass a Pizza Hut in 5.6 miles. Event #12 tells you that if you make it to a specific location, you’ve gone to far.

2) A drive from 60091 (Suburban Chicago) to Downtown Chicago.
Note event #5. It says that an Embassy Suites Hotel is on the corner. And again, the final event tells you if you’ve gone to far.

3) A drive from Orange County, CA to Beverly Hills, CA.
Event #1 says that you’ll pass a Carl’s Jr. restaurant in 1.1 miles. Event #5 notes that a Travelodge Motel is on the right in less than a mile.

See Also: Info About Bing’s Realtime Traffic Feature, Clearflow

The latest collection of “online maps of current interest” from the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection. Two interactive maps are included in the collection.

+ H1N1 Influenza (Swine Flu) Maps

+ North Korea Missile Launches and Underground Nuclear Test (BBC News)

+ Korea Maps (PCL Map Collection)

+ North Korea Uncovered (requires Google Earth)

+ Pakistan Conflict Map (BBC News)

+ Air France Flight 447 Path (BBC News)

+ Mexico at War Interactive Map (Washington Post)

+ General Motors Interactive Map (Detroit News)

+ U.S. Economy Maps including Economic Stress Map (AP)

+ U.S. Drought Map (NDMC)

Source: Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection (University of Texas)

From a Global Legal Monitor Post:

The World Trade Organization has recently posted on its website an interactive map that depicts disputes between its member states. The top of the webpage shows a list of highlight-able choices among types of member-state involvement in disputes: as complainant, respondent, or either. The accompanying map shows member-state areas of the world in a color range of whitish pink to red, to indicate the range in the number of disputes (0-100), and non-member-state areas in gray; the United States is bright red.

The user can click on a region of the world to highlight a given member state, to see the WTO disputes in which it is involved; alternatively, there is a drop-down box from which a country selection can be made. For example, clicking on the China area of the map, with the choice of “either,” causes lines in red (complainant) and blue (respondent) linking it to the other member state to pop up. A boxed number where the respective state is located shows that China is a complainant in four cases against the United States, and a respondent in seven cases brought by the United States, among cases brought by other member states. Clicking on the box brings up the details of the cases.

Direct to Interactive Maps

Source: World Trade Organization

Maximum posted speed limits

The following table lists the speed limits for various types of roads in the 50 US states and the District of Columbia. Limited access highways are multiple-lane roads with restricted access using exit and entrance ramps rather than intersections. Interstate highways are part of the national system of limited access highways that connect the nation’s principal metropolitan areas and industrial centers. The interstate system is divided into urban and rural sections. The distinction between urban and rural areas is based on population density figures from the US Census Bureau and adjusted by state and local government to reflect planning and other issues. Urban sections are within a census area with an urban population of 5,000 to 49,999 or within a designated urbanized area with a population of 50,000 or greater. Speed limits for commercial use trucks, if different, are listed separately.

Congress repealed the National Maximum Speed Limit in 1995. As of today, 33 states have raised speed limits to 70 mph or higher on some portion of their roadway systems.

Source: Insurance Institute for Highway Safety

From the Announcement:

…MetaCarta, a leading geoweb company, and Moreover have partnered on providing the news links for MetaCarta’s news maps. Give it a spin and find out what’s going on in your bit of the globe, http://geosearch.metacarta.com. Zoom in and click search again to update the results and see more local stories…

Direct to MetaCarta News Maps Powered by Moreover

Source: Moreover

Customizable Interactive Map Shows U.S. Alternative Fuel Data

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) announced the launch of a comprehensive mapping tool to help industry and government planners implement alternative fuels and advanced vehicles. The new TransAtlas tool combines several different types of geographic data to identify areas with potential for developing advanced transportation projects. It is sponsored by DOE’s Clean Cities initiative, which aims to reduce petroleum consumption in the transportation sector by promoting advanced vehicle technologies and alternative fuels. This interactive mapping tool is available by visiting www.afdc.energy.gov and clicking on the TransAtlas icon.

Source: National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL)

From the Digital Map Web Site:

The “Digital Map - Beta” is the first step toward a new generation of digital topographic maps delivered by the U.S. Geological Survey. These maps are built from The National Map data, which are integrated from local, State, Federal, and other sources. The initial version of the “Digital Map – Beta” includes orthoimagery plus roads and geographic names in the traditional 7.5 minute quadrangle format. “Digital Maps - Beta” are available free on the Web in the GeoPDF format. File size is about 15 to 20 Megabytes.

Tools are available free for download. Users can turn data layers on and off, zoom in and out, and print the maps. As the “Digital Map - Beta” evolves, the USGS will add historical versions of the topographic maps and will incorporate other data layers including hydrography and contours. Use of the term “Beta” signifies that these maps are initial versions that do not yet contain the full content of the traditional USGS topographic quadrangle maps.

See Also: Learn More About the Digital Map Project and Review a Project Timeline

Source: USGS