Geography

The American Geographical Society Library contains over 1.3 million items in a variety of formats, including maps, atlases, books, journals, pamphlets, photographs, slides, Landsat images, and digital spatial data.

From the White Mountains in Alaska to the Jupiter Inlet Lighthouse in Florida, map and geospatial products inform our federal management decisions. BLM has a collection of publicly available maps for the purposes of research and recreation.

The USGS is responsible for organizing, maintaining, and publishing the geospatial baseline of the US nation's topography, natural landscape, built environment, and more. Based on their fundamental science practices, the USGS provides online access to a collection of accurate geologic maps (2-D and 3-D) containing critical data that their users can rely upon to be impartial, unbiased, and objective. Take a look at the USGS map collection here. 

The Online Guide to U.S. Map Collections, a project by the Map and Geospatial Information Round Table (MAGIRT) of the American Library Association (ALA), is a crowd-sourced directory of map collections across the United States. It features a searchable map interface so users can easily locate map collections by their geographic location and find map collections with specific subject specialties by keyword search.

The California State Library has made a portion of their map collection viewable remotely on their online catalog. This collection is a remarkable resource for anyone researching California’s geography and history.

General maps are available for the world, continent or macro-regions, country or territories or specific regions of interest where the United Nations plays a role following specific mandates or resolutions. These maps are a practical way of sharing basic geographical information of UN factions. 

The ProtectedSeas Navigator is an interactive map and comprehensive database of global marine life protections and their boundaries. It provides access to regulatory information for over 21,000 managed saltwater and coastal areas worldwide, including the high seas, that is invaluable for assisting marine conservation and protection efforts. 

Started as a quarantine project by Sonali Ranjit and Vaishnav Balasubramaniam at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, WindowSwap is a "place on the internet where people from around the world share the view from their windows to help someone else relax, focus, meditate and travel without moving." Users can cycle through views from different places around the globe or share their own. 

IfItWereMyHome.com is a website dedicated to helping users understand life outside their own homes. Originally created in 2010 as a way to depict the magnitude of the BP oil spill, the creators realized the power of representing large facts in relation to a person's own home. The site features a country comparison tool to compare living conditions in a user's own country to those of another, as well as a visualization tool to help understand impacts of disaster like the aforementioned BP oil spill and the 2010 Pakistan Flood. 

Visualgeography.com is an educational tool that allows users to learn more about places and cultures around the world through audiovisual media and references. Users can explore countries by viewing images, flags, money, language, maps, and other information about a selected country. 

In their own words, Gapminder "identifies systematic misconceptions about important global trends and proportions and uses reliable data to develop easy to understand teaching materials to rid people of their misconceptions."

Free teaching and educational tools Gapminder provides include:

• Worldview Upgrader- A teaching tool to help users learn and rid themselves of the most common global misconceptions

• Bubbles (Animating Data)- A data visualization tool that helps users "get the proportions right and realize the macrotrends that will shape the future" by exploring data about societies across different geographical locales.

• Dollar Street - A site where users can "watch everyday life in hundreds of homes on all income levels across the world, to counteract the media’s skewed selection of images of other places."

The Mapping Inequality website is a searchable map with an interface that makes the security maps, data, and textual assessments of areas produced by the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) accessible digitally to the public. Learn more about the HOLC's legacy as a New Deal Era federal government agency regarded as "both a savior to the housing sector and a force for racial segregation" and explore the archival data at the website.

The StoryMaps Gallery is a free collection of digital stories that use geographic information system (GIS)-based maps to help inform and inspire audiences. The collection covers a wide range of interesting topics and also acts as a great reference for folks interested in learning how ArcGIS users are enhancing digital storytelling with maps. A sample of stories available to users includes: Mapping the Spread of COVID-19, Misconceptions ("Some common geographic mental misplacements"), Mapping the Thanksgiving Harvest, The Surprising State of Africa's Giraffes, Coastal Flooding, and many more.

In the blogger Jonathan Crowe's own words: "The Map Room is a blog about maps that covers everything from antique map collecting to the latest in geospatial technology." 

The Earth 3D Map website utilizes several mapping APIs and software such as Google Maps APIs, Google Earth plugins, and ArcGIS to provide users with a tool to explore geographic data on a 3D globe. This is a more user-friendly virtual exploration tool than the standard Google Earth site, as it has shorthand links to explore the world by areas of interest like Countries, Capitals, Cultural Landmarks (the Pyramids of Giza, the Parthenon, etc.), Skyscrapers, Mountains, and US States. 

A great description from the Google Earth website: "Google Earth is a computer program that renders a 3D representation of Earth based primarily on satellite imagery. The program maps the Earth by superimposing satellite images, aerial photography, and GIS data onto a 3D globe, allowing users to see cities and landscapes from various angles."

The National Geologic Map Database is a fantastic, distributed archive holding geoscience information standardized to USGS standards. Click through to access an extensive catalog of maps (including topographic maps), stratigraphy data, USGS standards for geologic map creation and reporting, database schema for digital geologic maps, and more.