If Google Really Wants to be Useful to Me…
…They can swoop in to hundreds of academic libraries in this country (or others) and scan the thousands and thousands of maps that have always been and are mostly still uncataloged and even largely unaccounted for. Almost every issue of the ALA MAGERT bulletin baseline includes a somewhat depressing round-up of the state of map record availability in academic library OPACs. Digitization projects, a few high-powered exceptions aside, are also not terribly abundant or comprehensive. Since Google has, sorry, but googles of dollars, why can’t they just send a robot in to scan our map collections? Those exist, right? Then they can hire thousands of people to rectify them. Maybe it’s already happening.
