The impermanence of maps will make the reconstruction of our thoughts and worldviews all that much more difficult for historians in the future. We only know of them because the cartographers wanted to share them with the cartographic community, not with an extended community of users. Librarians need to collect more aggressively in order to insure that these sorts of maps will be shared with a broader community. A brief bibliographic search of maps published in the Map Book series reveals that only since 1993, when ESRI began donating the selected maps to the Library of Congress, have these digital maps been cataloged. Libraries will have to market their skills as catalogers, indexers and conservators to the burgeoning community of digital map publishers if we hope to preserve of cartographic history.
Maps generated on the Internet represent an even more fragile picture of digital cartography.
MapQuest, the Internet mapping business, is the largest map publisher in the history of the cartography. More maps have been produced in the past seven years than ever before. MapQuest uses maps as navigational tools, but mapping is also a powerful visualization tool. Now, as data visualization emerges as the new 'killer app' maps are quickly being integrated into information standards. Mapnet is a tool for visualizing the Internet.