Acquisition of World War II Captured Maps: A Case Study

• Published in: Journal of map & geography libraries 2021-06, Vol.16 (2), p.140-165
• Main Authors: Sweetkind-Singer, Julie, March, Gregory
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Academic libraries; Army Map Service depository library program; captured maps; Case studies; depository library program; German maps; Japanese maps; Library collections; Map collections; World War II
• ISSN: 1542-0353; 1542-0361
• DOI: 10.1080/15420353.2021.1917472

At the end of World War II, United States Army officers located large troves of maps in Germany and Japan. These materials were shipped back to the United States and deposited with the Army Map Service (AMS). The AMS created a repository service to distribute the captured maps to libraries across the United States eventually sending them to a subset of thirty-five geographically dispersed institutions. While numerous libraries processed these materials, many did not, including the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who made the decision to donate their maps to Stanford University for cataloging and scanning. The majority of the maps were duplicative, but twenty percent of the corpus were either new sets or missing sheets from existing sets. Analyzing these collections allows librarians and scholars to understand the scope of the mapping carried out by the Germans and Japanese prior to and during the war. It also provides a framework to decide if a library should allocate processing, cataloging, and digitization resources for such unprocessed collections.