| Summary: | Published maps of Alaska provide a rich but underutilized historical resource. There have been several major bibliographies done in the past. Two of these are still in use today: Wagner's Cartography o f the Northwest Coast of America published in 1937 and Phillips' Alaska and the Northwest Part of North America, 1588-1898, published in 1898. A third major resource is A.V. Efimov's Atlas o f Geographical Discoveries in Siberia and North-western America, XVII-XV111 Centuries, published in 1964. The Efimov Atlas is a masterfully annotated compilation of early maps, primarily from Soviet archives. It covers 194 key maps. The Wagner cartobibliography is concerned more with California and the Pacific Northwest than it is with Alaska. His coverage ends in 1800, well before the full development of official Russian cartography of Alaska. The oldest of the bibliographies still in use is that of Phillip Lee Phillips. It is essentially a list of materials available in the Library of Congress and does not take account of other repositories. It also does not reflect the m any additions of early maps made to the Library of Congress in more recent years. A number of perimeters were adopted in deciding on how to handle this mass of information. The cartobibliography only lists published maps. This includes manuscript maps that were subsequently published in facsimile. Unpublished maps require an entirely different research strategy and a separate system of annotations. In addition, a work that included unpublished maps would be a very large undertaking, requiring a number of years of additional work to bring to fruition. Another major decision was to provide a guide to the location of map images, not an exhaustive bibliographic description of each map. I believe that the rigorous examination of states of a copper engraving plate, say, would prove of great value for some sub-sets in this bibliography, but it would not be feasible for the entire work. In addition, some of this work has already been done for some of the older ...
|
|---|