Maps

Special Collections: Top Shelf Blog: Feb. 2022

Collection of large-scale, building-level maps, depict the commercial, industrial and residential sections of some 12,000 cities and towns in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, 1867 - present. The Sanborn collection includes about 50,000 editions of fire insurance maps comprising an estimated 700,000 individual sheets. Also see Checklist of all print and electronic Sanborn Maps.

USGS maps range from detailed local areas to worldwide. The maps are excellent for a wide range of uses, including emergency response, outdoor recreation, scientific research, and resource management.

Digital repository of USGS 1:250,000 scale and larger maps printed between 1884, the inception of the topographic mapping program, and 2006. USGS is the largest producer of topographic maps. Their National Geospatial Program (NGP) converted these historical printed topographic quadrangles to an electronic format (GeoPDF).

The USGS is a science organization that provides impartial information on the health of our ecosystems and environment, the natural hazards that threaten us, the natural resources we rely on, the impacts of climate and land-use change, and the core science systems that help us provide timely, relevant, and usable information.

Search for publications. Advanced search allows limiting by USGS publication series. Browse feature

A collaborative effort among the USGS National Geospatial Program and other Federal, State, and local partners to improve and deliver topographic information for the Nation.

USGS topical directory provides an alternate way to browse USGS science programs by data, news, images, video, social media, more.

Topical directory provides an alternate way to browse USGS science programs by data, news, images, video, social media, more.

This site out of the University of Texas at Austin is an excellent portal to a variety of high quality cartographical web sites. The links are very reliable.

Over 400,000 map images.

Area, thematic, and boundary maps primarily of Texas. The Texas Demographic Center is a focal point for the distribution of Census information for Texas.

Afriterra is an archive of antique maps and books related to Africa. It maintains a searchable catalog of over 2,500 high-resolution maps dating from 1480 to 1900 .

Topical maps and data for Mexico from Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía. Instructions and tools are in Spanish.

A variety of topics are covered in the Census Atlas, ranging from language and ancestry characteristics to housing patterns and the geographic distribution of the population. A majority of the maps in the Census Atlas present data at the county level, but data also are sometimes mapped by state, census tract (for largest cities and metropolitan areas), and for selected American Indian reservations.

Use the box on the home page to find the flood insurance map for a specific city, state or address.

View digitized versions of maps and inserts from National Geographic magazine.

Collection of one-page black and white national and international maps with accompanying PDF files for download or printing.

Continents, regions, territories, dependencies, countries, states, and provinces.

Data maps by themes including population, gender, agriculture, race, veterans.

Soil data and information produced by National Cooperative Soil Survey. Operated by the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, NCRS has soil maps and data available online for more than 95 percent of U.S. counties. Also see in print Soil Survey of Bexar County (1966)

Each survey consists of a soil map and separate book. The maps show many cultural features in the landscape such as businesses, churches, schools, mills, gins, and ferries. The collection embraces all Texas county and reconnaissance soil surveys completed prior to 1950.

View NOAA's 1000+ U.S. coastal and Great Lakes nautical charts. These charts are updated weekly and include all of the latest Notice to Mariners corrections.

Collection of large-scale, building-level maps, depict the commercial, industrial and residential sections of some 12,000 cities and towns in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, 1867 - present. The Sanborn collection includes about 50,000 editions of fire insurance maps comprising an estimated 700,000 individual sheets. Also see Checklist of all print and electronic Sanborn Maps.

The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) was established in 1933 as a federal government-sponsored program. San Antonio was one of the cities for which "residential security maps" were created. Red color coding on these maps often outlined neighborhoods in the older sections of cities, where homeowners and tenants had lower incomes, or in neighborhoods that were made up of ethnic or racial minorities.

Depicting San Antonio, Texas, shortly before the Battle of the Alamo.

EPA 1995

Three-part series on DVD tells the story of map-making, from ancient times to the 20th century, demonstrating with dramatizations and scholarship the human quest to know and possess the world.

U.S. Geological Survey