<story><title>USGS Historical Topographic Maps</title><url>https://www.esri.com/arcgis-blog/products/arcgis-living-atlas/mapping/access-over-181000-usgs-historical-topographic-maps/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jedberg</author><text>I went on a tour of the USGS in Palo Alto in 2012.  They used to keep all the Bay Area Topo maps there.  The curator of the museum had a burning hatred for Google (which was basically across the street).&lt;p&gt;He told us that Google is 100% to blame for the cancellation of the USGS topographic maps program.  Their management told him &amp;quot;Google is capturing it all now, so we don&amp;#x27;t need to do it anymore&amp;quot;.  He hated them with a burning passion because he was told to turn over all of his maps to Google for digitization into Google Maps because they would be shutting down the paper archives that he was in charge of.&lt;p&gt;He wasn&amp;#x27;t mad because his job was going away (they were going to reassign him anyway) -- he was mad because he felt that it wasn&amp;#x27;t right for Google to be in charge of archiving and controlling access to what was public information.  He was also mad because Google&amp;#x27;s maps weren&amp;#x27;t nearly as good as his.&lt;p&gt;I hope that guy is still around and happy to see that the topographic maps live on and are freely available now.</text></comment>
<story><title>USGS Historical Topographic Maps</title><url>https://www.esri.com/arcgis-blog/products/arcgis-living-atlas/mapping/access-over-181000-usgs-historical-topographic-maps/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nullhole</author><text>The maps are available directly through the USGS as well, if you want to avoid the 3rd party viewer:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;ngmdb.usgs.gov&amp;#x2F;topoview&amp;#x2F;viewer&amp;#x2F;#4&amp;#x2F;40.01&amp;#x2F;-100.06&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;ngmdb.usgs.gov&amp;#x2F;topoview&amp;#x2F;viewer&amp;#x2F;#4&amp;#x2F;40.01&amp;#x2F;-100.06&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>