The justification for asking this question on lis-maps is flimsy, but this is to enable a systematic survey of the maps appearing within school text books in current use for geography and history, internationally.
For use nationally, i.e. books produced for the UK education market, a workable solution is to go to a small block of shelves within the Institute of Education’s library in London — I was there on Friday. Almost certainly, all of these books are also in the British Library and other copyright libraries, but the problems then are (a) how can you tell from the catalogue which books are current school texts and (b) ordering them up one by one would take forever. At the IoE, you can just work shelf-by-shelf, and identify the majority of books that contain no maps very quickly (there are many more history than geography texts).
The problem is that the Institute collection is limited not just to books in English, but to books tailored to our National Curriculum and examining boards.
Any ideas at all how we can survey textbooks used in other countries? If this goes ahead this would be a funded project which is supposed to cover textbook maps “around the world”. The funding would cover some travel, so our main current idea is that we try to identify specialist libraries in other countries similar to that of the Institute of Education, and visit key ones. It would be entirely practical for us to visit, say, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, but we would then have the same problems noted above for the British Library. So where in France is there a collection specifically of school texts? Ditto in (say) Germany, Spain and the US? Does anyone anywhere have a multi-national collection of _recent_ school texts?
… So this is basically a question about the locations of another type of specialist libraries, not map libraries. Another part of the project is about atlases, but that seems totally straightforward by comparison.
Humphrey Southall
Professor of Historical Geography/
Director, GB Historical GIS
University of Portsmouth
Geography Dept, Buckingham Bldg,
Lion Terrace, Portsmouth PO1 3HE, UK
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