Today is Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day.  On this date 75 years ago, Pearl Harbor was attacked by Japanese forces, leaving over 3,400 casualties and pushing the U.S. to join the Allies in World War II.

National Geographic has an interesting site with an audio/visual timeline tour showing what went down during that day through attack maps.  Check it out!

San Diego map collector, William Speidel, would like to donate his map collection of about 1,000 maps to a library, geography or geology department in the United States.  The collection is current with maps dating from the 1960s to the 2000s.  While the collection would be a donation, the accepting library would need to pay for the mailing of materials.  Included in the donation are the following types of maps: * Nautical charts (Alaska, Australia, China, Japan, US Gulf of Mexico, US Pacific, US Atlantic, Thailand, Vietnam, Western Mediterranean); * Bathymetric charts (Australia, US Atlantic, California, China, Gulf of California, Thailand); * USGS topographic maps (1:24k, 1:62.5K) (California, Arizona, Texas, Mississippi, etc.); * Other maps including miscellaneous geologic maps, Gebco Charts, soil charts, sediment distribution.  Excel spreadsheets are available detailing the full collection.

Mr. Speidel is interested in the whole collection going to one library rather than breaking it up into pieces.  If you are interested, please contact Julie Sweetkind-Singer (sweetkind@stanford.edu) and she will pass along his contact information and the spreadsheets to you directly.

The Library of Congress signed a memorandum of understanding with the Digital Public Library of America to become a Content Hub and will ultimately share a significant portion of its rich digital resources with DPLA’s database of digital content records.

The first batch of records will include 5,000 items from three major Library of Congress map collections: the Revolutionary War, Civil War, and panoramic maps.