Replacing 8,000 Maps Destroyed in Flood

East View Cartographic (EVC) was recently chosen by the University of Hawaii to replace more than 8,000 items lost in the flash flood of 2004 and recently shipped the University's library the first set of 367 maps and basic metadata.  

On 30th October 2004 a severe thunderstorm dumped more than ten inches of rain in just 12 hours, resulting in a flash flood that tore through the Manoa Valley, including the campus of the University of Hawaii. Disaster recovery at the library's Map and Aerial Photo collection (Manoa MAGIS) involved painstaking work not unlike cleanup efforts following Hurricane Katrina or the Red River Floods of recent years. Natural disasters often impact libraries and this requires specialized resources to rebuild lost or damaged collections.

Kent Lee, CEO at EVC: "East View Cartographic is well positioned to take on this task and is proud to partner with the University of Hawaii. EVC has a massive collection of print, digitised and born-digital maps - as well as the metadata describing them - making us very familiar with the requirements of map libraries. More importantly, though, we have the required technical know-how and 20 years of experience in project management, including managing publisher relations for rights and permissions. This is critical for this project. " G. Salim Mohammed, the Maps/GIS librarian at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, says "We are delighted to find a partner such as EVC to help replace many of maps in digital form and appreciate EVC's flexibility in working with us to provide the maps in a format that meet our specifications."  EVC will provide the maps in digital form along with basic metadata to assist their discovery by library users.