About the Collection
South Asia Maps Collection
From holdings in the Map Collection, Second Floor, Waldo Library
At the end of World War II the Army Map Service (AMS) had surplus copies of maps they had prepared in support of the war effort. These duplicate maps were distributed to educational institutions all over the country. Some of these maps are now housed in the Map Collection of Waldo Library at Western Michigan University (WMU).
When the W. E. Upjohn Center for the Study of Geographical Change at WMU was setting up its imaging equipment it borrowed a number of maps from various AMS series covering the area of South Asia from Afghanistan to Burma to use as test materials. In exchange, the Center supplied copies of the scans to Waldo Library.
These scans complemented the growing collection of scanned indexes to the various AMS series held in Waldo Library’s collections. These AMS indexes are available.
Due to the current interest in Afghanistan and because so many high quality scans were readily available, the library decided to construct a copy of the index to AMS series U511 (Afghanistan) that would lead a user directly to the scanned image of the map sheet. We called this a click-through index.
Waldo Library’s collection of sheets covering Afghanistan (U511) is incomplete. The library is lacking 22 sheets. In order to create a more complete digital collection of these maps than we actually had in paper the library reviewed OCLC’s WorldCat database and found a number of other libraries holding this series. The Map Collection at the University of Texas at Austin holds all but two of the missing sheets and generously loaned them to us. The sheets from the University of Texas were scanned by the University Libraries’ Digitization Center here at Western Michigan University.
While series U511 was originally published by the Army Map Service, the sheets are reprints of earlier maps published by Great Britain’s Geographic Section, General Staff. The maps are based on surveys from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Because the maps are based on such early surveys, they do not exhibit a high level of accuracy. Much better maps of the area exist. These scans are provided as historical artifacts of the type of maps available at the time they were produced. As such, they represent the best knowledge of the area at that time and were some of the maps used by members of the armed forces deployed in the area or in command centers where military operations were planned. They are useful to researches today for that reason.
We would like to thank Dr. David Dickason and Gregory Anderson of the W.E. Upjohn Center for the Study of Geographical Change for most of the scanned images in the collection, Sheila Bair of the WMU Libraries for her work on the metadata, Paul Howell of the WMU Libraries' Digitization Center for scanning the maps from the University of Texas at Austin and his work on ingesting the scans into the LUNA digital collections system, Michael Whang of the University Libraries' Web Office for his work on the web pages, Jason Glatz of the University Libraries' Map Collection for his work on the metadata and for tracking down the maps at the University of Texas at Austin, and especially Paul Rascoe and Katherine Strickland of the Perry-Castanada Library Map Collection at the University of Texas at Austin for loaning us the missing sheets.