News Releases

University of Hawaii and East View Cartographic Partner to Replace Map Library Destroyed by 2004 Flood

MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota, USA – December 11, 2008 – East View Cartographic (EVC) was recently chosen by the University of Hawaii to replace more than 7000 items lost in the flash flood of 2004 and recently shipped the University’s library the first set of 367 maps and metadata.

On October 30, 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 University’s Manoa Maps, Aerials and GIS (MAGIS: http://magis.manoa.hawaii.edu) 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 East View Cartographic, is honored to participate in the remaking of collection: “East View Cartographic is well positioned to take on this task and is proud to partner with the University of Hawaii. EVC not only has a massive collection of print and born-digital maps, but we have the technical know-how and 20 years’ experience in managing rights and permissions, which was critical for this project. University libraries fulfill a critical scholarly mission and their collections, assembled over decades or even centuries, reflect the uniqueness of that institution’s role in its region, the nation, and the world. The University of Hawaii was founded in 1907 and has a very important geographic role for the United States and the Pacific.” G. Salim Mohammed, the MAGIS 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.

About East View

East View was founded in 1989 and is headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. East View is comprised of East View Information Services (www.eastview.com), East View Geospatial (www.geospatial.com) and East View Map Link (www.evmaplink.com). East View maintains thousands of supplier/publisher relationships throughout the world for maps and geospatial data and Russian, Arabic and Chinese-produced social and hard science content. East View manages a data center, library and warehouse in Minneapolis where it hosts and stores dozens of foreign language databases, hundreds of thousands of maps and atlases and millions of geospatial, Russian, Chinese and Arabic metadata records. Uncommon Information. Extraordinary Places. East View.