Exhibition Overview
The Library of Congress presents Maps
in Our Lives, an exhibition in recognition of a thirty-year
partnership between the Library's Geography
and Map Division and the American
Congress on Surveying and Mapping (ACSM), the nation’s
primary professional organization dedicated to surveying
and mapping activities. This exhibition explores four constituent
professions represented by the ACSM--surveying, cartography,
geodesy, and geographic information systems (GIS)--and draws
on both the Library’s historic map collections and
the ACSM collection in the Library of Congress.
The surveying section
of this exhibition features maps illustrating the historical
evolution in surveying with maps of George Washington's
farm executed between 1760 and 1999. The cartographic
section highlights more than forty items selected from
ACSM's annual map design competition and exemplifies
notable advances in cartographic interpretation, design,
and production over the last twenty-two years. The
portion of the exhibit about geodesy (the science that
determines precise locations on the Earth's surface,
such as latitude and longitude) demonstrates the value
of geodetic surveying and its impact on our daily lives.
The exhibit also features a
video that provides a historical and spatial comparison of
the surveying maps featured in this exhibit. These maps are
overlaid with contemporary GIS data of the same area and show
the power of GIS in presenting and interpreting landscape
over time.
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