Maps - 2

I've been working my way through the literature on the Battle of Antietam lately. I've recently finished reading Murfin (The Gleam Of Bayonets: The Battle Of Antietam And Robert E. Lee's Maryland Campaign, September, 1862), Tom Clemen's edition of Carman (MARYLAND CAMPAIGN OF SEPTEMBER 1862, THE: Volume 1, South Mountain), and am working my way through Harsh (Confederate Tide Rising: Robert E. Lee and the Making of Southern Strategy, 1861-1862, Taken at the Flood: Robert E. Lee and Confederate Strategy in the Maryland Campaign of 1862). I will shortly be going back and rereading Sears (Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam). One thing that has become very clear is that I need to see some better maps, in particular of the fighting in the morning on the north end of the battlefield. What happened there is very confusing today, and was quite evidently equally confusing while it was happening.
I anticipate that the maps in Clemen's second volume of the Carman manuscript will be excellent, but that book is still probably a couple of years away. However, there is a famous set of maps from the early 1900s, the Cope maps, which were prepared at the same time that Ezra Carman was writing his account of the battle. The Cope maps are no secret, they are a sequence corresponding to various times of day. A poster of the 8:20am-8:40am map is even available at the Antietam Battlefield Visitor Center (and yes, I have a copy of that one.) But seemingly, unless an old copy shows up at an antiquarian book seller, the full set is unobtainable these days (The maps in The Gleam of Bayonets are based on the Cope maps, but the reduction to a size suitable for a trade paperback didn't do them much good.)
So in the course of searching, I found digitized copies of the Cope maps at the Library of Congress Site. Unfortunately, the web based viewer provided is an archaic design, crude to the point of uselessness. The good news seemed to be that you can download them, but wait, they're in a proprietary compressed format named MrSID, based on research at Los Alamos but commercialized by an outfit named LizardTech. The howtos hint at Mac OS X viewers, but no such viewers appear to exist.
I am profoundly aggravated that resources like these, which should be free and easy to access, are instead so damned difficult to get at. The only good news in all of this is that I do have a copy of Parallels on my Mac, but i shouldn't have to run windows at all to get reasonable access to these maps, producted by the US Government more than 100 years ago.

It occurs to me that since i restarted the blog, i've not written about OpenStreetMap, which actually is something that takes a lot of my time and energy (I'm currently VP of the US Chapter of the OpenStreetMap Foundation, which was just founded this year and is an organization that's feeling its way towards the future.)
I was introduced to OpenStreetMap by Russ Nelson, who I have known from anti-spam circles for so long that I really don't know how long it's been. It's a remarkable project to build a truly free map of the world, a reaction to map databases that are heavily constrained by licensing agreements. OSM maps are still improving, and they're further along in Europe than they are here in the US, but the potential is pretty awesome. The potential is awesome enough, in fact, that Mapquest is looking to it for the future, and is opening up Open Mapquest Sites based on OSM data left and right.
You may wonder what brought this posting on. Well, yesterday on the way home from work I took a little time to survey the new Single Point Urban Interchange where NY 7, NY 2, and I-87 meet in Latham NY. It was only completed fairly recently, and it was on my mind that it was pretty different from what was there before, enough to justify some serious effort. So I made multiple passes through it logging the paths with my Garmin (in off-road mode so it wouldn't be polluted with pre-existing map data, Garmins are odd about that.) Later last night, I sat down using JOSM (one of the OSM editors) and painstakingly rearranged the ramps, added new ramps, and went through and made sure that all the oneway and relationship roles were correct.
So today, I checked OSM and the interchange has been properly re-rendered (sometimes it takes a day or two). Here it is in OSM: http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=42.7533&lon=-73.76855&zoom=16&layers=M.
And sure enough, OpenMapquest has picked it up too: http://open.mapquest.co.uk/link/h/1-WFfDs4JT
Compare with Yahoo Maps and Google Maps (note that Yahoo and Google will eventually fix their maps, so as this post ages the point will be obscured.)
What really got my attention, in addition to the rapidity with which this map was adjusted to match the new reality is all those points of interest the gas stations, hotels, banks, restaurants and stores in the OSM & OpenMapquest maps. They got my attention because I am the person who surveyed them and put them there. There's a genuine feeling of accomplishment that goes with that.
OSM is good for more than just online maps, though. Experimental Garmin maps are available, and are what I normally use instead of the Garmin supplied maps. They are not for the faint of heart or risk averse, but I've been using them for all of 2010 to date, and while they're still a work in progress, the progress has been substantial, and I can even see my points of interest showing up in the Garmin displays.
What we need in the US are more mappers, mappers who want to locate and enter POIs (Points of Interest), mappers who want to verify and fix errors in the data (the base map was imported from a US Census bureau data set named Tiger a couple of years ago, and needs a lot of validation and cleanup work), or just mappers who want to map their favorite thing, whether it's hiking trails or bike trails (hint: I don't think the Applachian Trail is fully mapped. Someone needs to take a look at that.)