A few links to news stories to tide you over during the holidays:

• The Montreal Gazette on OpenStreetMap
• The Chicago Tribune on map collecting
• The Times rambles about the technology behind in-car navigation devices

I’ll be off for about a week or so, during which time I will have limited or sporadic access to the Internet. This is deliberate: I need a bit of a break.

But in the new year I hope to be able to devote more time to this site. Over the past five months, I’ve been working on a contract that has limited the time and energy I’ve been able to devote to The Map Room. That contract has been renewed, but on a part-time basis, in part so that I can come back to this site and my other projects, all of which have been languishing. I’m looking forward to getting back up to speed.

A cartogram showing the world’s oil reserves: the larger the country, the more oil it has. The Arabian peninsula is understandably enormous; see also Nigeria and Venezuela. Not sure how this map works, since both Canada and Russia are disproportionately small despite what I thought were substantial oil reserves. Via Kottke.

Yahoo follows Google’s lead, adding user-adjustable driving directions with a click-and-drag interface. Now that I’ve this feature for a while, I now consider it essential, especially when you have some sense of what the best route will be for at least part of the trip.

Previously: Google Maps: Draggable Driving Directions.

Today’s Globe and Mail has a profile of Roger Tomlinson, whose work with the Canadian government in the 1960s to develop the first national computerized GIS system has apparently earned him the title of “the father of GIS.”

How many definitions of the word “map” have there been? According to this page, at least 321. Via a discussion on MapHist.

A piece in last Friday’s Christian Science Monitor looks at the Festival of Maps through the lens of map art, referencing our friend Nikolas Schiller, the special map art issue of Cartographic Perspectives, the book accompanying the Field Museum exhibition, and a book drawing on the Library of Congress’s map collections entitled Mapping Civilizations. Whew! Via Anything Geospatial.

• Buy Mapping Civilizations at Amazon.com
• Buy Maps: Finding Our Place in the World at Amazon.com

Paula Scher (see previous entry) returns to the Maya Stendhal Gallery in New York with an exhibition of new works. According to the gallery, “Scher expands on her highly acclaimed Maps series to create her most engaging work yet, depicting entire continents, countries and cities from all over the world that have been the critical focus of attention in recent headlines.” The exhibition runs until January 26, 2008. Via Vector One; see also Visual Complexity.

The long-anticipated exhibit of Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 world map — you know, the first one to name the New World “America” — opens this Thursday at the Library of Congress. The sole surviving copy of Waldseemüller’s map, which has been in the Library of Congress’s possession since 2003, when it bought the map for $10 million, but was formally transferred in a ceremony earlier this year, will be on display inside its super-secure, argon-filled display case.

“Exploring the Early Americas,” which features items from the Jay I. Kislak Collection and Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 World Map — the first document of any kind to use the word “America” — focuses on the history and legacies of the Americas and the impact of European contact, culture and conquest. It opens Thursday, Dec. 13, in the Northwest Galleries of the Great Hall of the Thomas Jefferson Building, 10 First St. S.E., Washington, D.C. The exhibition, with labels presented in both English and Spanish, is free and open to the public from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday–Saturday.

Last week’s New York Times Magazine had a story about the Waldseemüller map; the Reuters wire story (here and here, for example) examines some of the map’s mysteries, such as the apparent presence of an ocean west of the Americas (conjecture, I suspect) and the fact that Waldseemüller removed both that ocean and the name “America” from the map in subsequent editions.

Previously: Upcoming Books on Waldseemüller; More About Waldseemüller.

• Buy Putting “America” on the Map at Amazon.com

Sure, stories about drivers getting into trouble because they blindly obey their GPS navigation stories are fun, but, as I mentioned in a previous entry, you can’t help but wonder about the bigger picture — i.e., why is this happening? In today’s New York Times, an article that tries to address that question: it looks at the phenomenon of truck drivers being led by their GPS units through narrow-streeted villages in the UK. Again, why is this happening? One piece of the puzzle:

As for trucks getting lost, much of the problem is caused by truck drivers from other countries — more than 14,000 a day — who come from abroad with GPS devices but without maps or an ability to read English road signs, said Geoff Dossetter, a spokesman for the Freight Transport Association, which represents road haulers.

“Foreign drivers very much depend on sat nav systems when they’re coming to a different country, and they are following them rather more blindly than they ought to,” Mr. Dossetter said.

Via All Points Blog.

Brendan Crain writes, “I have seen a few posts on The Map Room about the Festival of Maps here in Chicago. I just wanted to let you know that I’ve been attending and reviewing the shows around town. Here’s a link to what I’ve covered so far, in case you are interested.” Brendan’s blog is called Where, and it’s about urban geography.

If any other readers have been attending the Festival’s exhibits, (1) I’m insanely jealous and (2) I’d very much like to hear about it.

Nearly seven metres long and only 34 centimetres wide, the Tabula Peutingeriana is a 13th-century monk’s copy of a much older map of the Roman road network. This fascinating map stretches from Portugal to India — and stretch is the operative word here, with the distortion inherent in such an aspect ratio. So fragile it cannot stand the sun, it is almost never shown to the public. But last Monday was an exception: the BBC reports that it was put on display at the Austrian National Library, where it presently resides, for a grand total of one day to celebrate its listing on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register.

In the BBC story, a curator compares it to a diagrammatic transit plan like the Beck tube map, which I find quite interesting.

More about the Field Museum’s exhibit, Maps: Finding Our Place in the World: Antiques and the Arts Online has a rundown (via Map the Universe); Chicago Public Radio has audio from the first of a series of lectures taking place as part of the exhibit (Dr. Ryan Williams, Curator of Archaeological Science, discusses the use of GPS in archaeological research).

Previously: Festival of Maps: Field Museum Exhibit Virtual Gallery; Festival of Maps Update: Book, KML.

TOPO! Hacker is a relatively new, unofficial blog about messing around with National Geographic’s TOPO! software. Via GPS Tracklog.

With Garmin out of the picture, you’d think that TomTom’s proposed takeover of Tele Atlas would be free of further complications, but no: European Union regulators are investigating the deal over competitive concerns; they’re expected to rule by next April. Engadget, GeoCarta.

Two and a half years ago, Bill Schroeder found a mapping error on a globe at the new Canadian War Museum. The globe depicted the Boer War, and labelled Southern Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe) as Northern Rhodesia (present-day Zambia). He’s been after the museum bureaucrats to fix the minor error ever since. Amazingly, they still haven’t corrected the globe. Bureaucracies. Via MAPS-L.