My first stint into the world of mapping started in 1992. Yeah – 1992.
I had just found myself laid off from a job where I helped print signs. Dad always called it my motivational job to stay in college. He called it his career. I answered the phone and it was one of my college professors calling to tell me the that TVA map store had a temporary position open: Map folding person. So I went to work in TVA’s Map and Photo Records
It was truly an odd place. Maps from the last 60 years of TVA’s existence. I would hazard a guess that there were millions of frames of aerial photography. Land records. Survey records. No one really knew quite what to do with that department. We weren’t really on the hook for selling quadrangle maps and aerial photography. It was always a feel good part of it all though – it was a way for TVA to give back. It was painful to watch management struggle with what to do with all the material in the map store. Remember this was the mid 90’s so the idea of scanning all this material wasn’t quite feasible. When it got to be feasible in the mid 2000’s no one wanted to put their neck out on the limb and get it done. We would yell and scream and management would not really do much except recite budget numbers.
I left the Map Store in 1994 or 95 and pursued a slightly different career path within the larger department of Maps and Surveys. I stayed in Maps and Surveys until 2008 working with clients, customers, and lots of computers and software. I often made a joke and it was never much of a joke: I was a Map Store Employee before I was Maps and Surveys Employee. I was Maps and Surveys Employee before I ever felt a part of TVA. When I didn’t feel like I was either of the first two I left.
Then I received this in the email:
Tight budgets have everyone taking a hard look at what we do, how we do it and what provides the most value to ratepayers. Regrettably, some projects or services will need to stop.
One of these is TVA’s Map and Photos group’s service fulfilling public requests for maps, atlases and photos including those compiled by TVA since it began mapping in the 1930s. This service will no longer be provided to the public after May 31, 2013.
The nominal fee charged to meet these requests doesn’t begin to cover the time it takes to fulfill them. Also, many retail and other organizations exist that offer similar information. TVA will provide links on the website to some of them.
However, these records and all the other historic data stored at Maps and Photos Records remain available for TVA internal customers. This group is responsible for managing TVA’s historical maps and aerial photography. Today it hosts about 45,000 original maps and over 2 million aerial photographs dating back to the origin of TVA through the present.
I don’t give them long before the whole of the map store is lost. It’s a lot of data. It’s a lot of Information. All I feel is a lot of Anger it ends like that with 4 paragraphs.
