Overview
During World War II, the Map Division of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) created thousands of maps for intelligence purposes, many of which were declassified and distributed to libraries across the United States after the war. Over the course of the Fall 2019 semester, the student assistants at the Donald W. Hamer Center for Maps and Geospatial Information chose select OSS maps to georeference, and digitize, in order to capture and share the data more effectively. Throughout the project, students selected maps from the Donald W. Hamer Center for Maps and Geospatial Information’s online collection, georeferenced them, and digitized information on them to create feature layers to be shared online. This work created over forty layers of digitized features for public use, covering a variety of political, cultural, and economic topics. The project allowed students to gain experience in digitizing data through ArcGIS Pro, and encouraged students to think about how to digitally capture data and then distribute it.
World War II OSS Maps Application
This story map Cascade presents an overview to the OSS Maps project, including a background on OSS and the maps used, as well as information regarding the digitized content and digitization process.
OSS Map Gallery
This gallery showcases the products of this project. Included in the gallery are feature layers of digitized features, web maps created with these feature layers, and tile layers of the original georeferenced maps.
Project Contributors
Maps and GIS Assistants
- Ishaan Anavkar
- Zhaogeng Ding
- Jamie Friedken
- Nicholas Friedken
- Katie Giesa
- Milan Liu
- Daniel Valadas
- Brittany Waltemate
- Thomas Whalon
Project Supervisors
- Tara Anthony (GIS Specialist)
- Heather Ross (Map Specialist)