Civil War Maps, 1861 -1865

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/civil_war_maps/index.html

This collection is part of the Library of Congress it brings together maps from the Library of Congress Geography and Map Division, the Virginia Historical Society, and the Library of Virginia.

Selection decisions
This collection contains “2,240 Civil War maps and charts and 76 atlases and sketchbooks that are held within the Geography and Map Division, 200 maps from the Library of Virginia, and 400 maps from the Virginia Historical Society”. As far as I can tell everything they had in the three collections was digitized.

Metadata
Included metadata is: Item Title, Created/Published, Notes, Subjects, Related Names, Medium, Call Number, Repository, and Digital ID. They also give extensive information on how the collection was built and all the rights and reproduction information, and creation details; there is different information for each of the three sources of the images.

Object Characteristics
Objects can be viewed by the Library of Congress zoom viewer. It has a maximum of a 640 by 480 window that allows for extensive zooming in on the object. The images are jpeg2000. The original master images were created differently depending on the institution. Standards are similar however Master images are 300 dpi TIFFs, reference images are 300 dpi SID, thumbnails are small GIFs.

Intended Audience
This is an extensive high quality collection; it is quite adequate for scholarly work. Anybody who wants to have Civil War maps to display could use this site as well.