The integration of the maps captured from Germany proved to be easier than the Japanese maps as the language barrier was lower. The greater challenge came in processing and integrating them into the collections with proper metadata. Housing the collections, while a challenge at first, turned out to be the least onerous of the requirements for receiving the maps.
Duplicate maps abounded in these collections and were distributed through their depository system to libraries willing to catalog, house, and manage the content. During and after World War II, the Army Map Service served as a conduit for libraries to receive maps from overseas stockpiles of German and Japanese captured maps. It also provides a framework to decide if a library should allocate processing, cataloging, and digitization resources for such unprocessed collections.Īcademic map collections in the United States have greatly benefited from their participation in depository library programs from different arms of the federal government, most notably the Army Map Service, the Library of Congress, and the Government Printing Office. Analyzing these collections allows librarians and scholars to understand the scope of the mapping carried out by the Germans and Japanese prior to and during the war. The majority of the maps were duplicative, but twenty percent of the corpus were either new sets or missing sheets from existing sets. While numerous libraries processed these materials, many did not, including the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who made the decision to donate their maps to Stanford University for cataloging and scanning. The AMS created a repository service to distribute the captured maps to libraries across the United States eventually sending them to a subset of thirty-five geographically dispersed institutions. These materials were shipped back to the United States and deposited with the Army Map Service (AMS). At the end of World War II, United States Army officers located large troves of maps in Germany and Japan.
0 kommentar(er)
