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The OsmAnd folder on the drive has detailed maps (roads, towns and place search) that work with no internet. Which area you have was picked when the drive was made: the whole USA, Oregon and California, or Oregon only. To change it, run the installer again.
There are two kinds of map on the drive:
In the library, open 🔧 Tools → 🗺️ Map. It works on a phone, tablet or computer, and on any phone using the library over Wi-Fi (the ARK Vault's too). No app, no signal.
What it shows: roads, forest roads and trails, creeks, peaks and towns, with topo lines (heights in feet) and shaded hills.
Property lines and public land: thin orange lines are tax lots. Colors show who manages the land (BLM, National Forest, state, county); private land has no color.
On a phone, each panel that slides up has a small handle at its top: drag it up to make the panel taller, down to see more of the map, or right down to close it.
🗂️ Layers: switch on what you need, and tap anything on the map to see what it is. Under each layer that is on, the Opacity slider makes it fainter or more solid, so one layer can show through another; ↺ puts it back. Which layers there are depends on the area's library:
| Group | Layers |
|---|---|
| Water | Creeks that run all year or only part of it, springs, wells and how deep they are, dams |
| Food and growing | Good growing ground, sightings of wild food plants and mushrooms, salmon and trout streams, frost pockets (low ground where frost comes early and stays late) |
| Hunting | Where deer and elk live and gather by season, sightings of game animals and birds, the state's hunting units |
| Materials | Timber (which trees grow where), rock types and what each is good for, mines, quarries and mineral sites |
| Hazards | Past wildfires, flood zones, old landslides |
| Places and getting around | Medical, fuel, food and hardware, fire stations, bridges and their weight limits, camps, escape routes, walking routes, forest and BLM roads (the number on the sign, and whether you can drive it), gates and road blocks, radio towers and fire lookouts |
| Base map and land | Steep ground, sunny (south-facing) slopes, the township and section grid |
📏 Measure: tap points along a way for the distance over the ground (the climbs and drops counted, not just the flat distance on the map), the ups and downs, and about how long it takes on foot, there and back. With two points it also says whether one can see the other, which is what a radio link needs.
📌 Pins: tap the map, then Save as a pin, to mark your own places. Pins are kept on that phone or computer only; Save my pins to a file carries them to another.
Shared pins: on a library shared over Wi-Fi (an ARK Vault, say), tick Share it with everyone using this library when you save a pin. Every phone on that Wi-Fi then sees it, marked 📍. Anyone can add or remove one, so use them like a notice board: a meeting place, a spring, a blocked road.
Tap anywhere for the height, the position (latitude and longitude), the tax lot, its acres and, where the county publishes it, the recorded owner.
Find a place or an address: in the box at the top, type part of a name (a creek, a peak, a road), or a house number and street (1800 White Schoolhouse Rd), or a position (42.1634, -123.6479). Addresses are the county's own, so a new house may be missing.
📍 Where am I: shows your position as a blue dot. From the library website (saved on the phone) it just works. On a phone using a library over Wi-Fi (the ARK Vault's too), tap 📍 and follow the steps: the phone warns once that the connection is "not private", because the library makes its own security certificate. Accept it, tap 📍 again, and allow location.
🖨️ Print: prints the part of the map on the screen, north up, with a scale bar. On the library's receipt printer it comes out in black and white, in one to four strips to tape side by side; on an ordinary printer, as one color page.
How far it reaches: the map covers the Illinois Valley and the country around it, west to the coast and south to the Klamath River. Property lines, owners, house numbers and some layers come from one county or one state and stop at its edge. Beyond that the map still has roads, trails, topo lines, public land and the nationwide layers (creeks and springs, forest roads, timber, rock types, past wildfires, flood zones, wild food and game). Where the library's website keeps a bigger map online, the map there also reaches further while the phone has a signal (the bottom of the Layers panel says how far); with no signal it is the saved map, as before.
A bigger map still (on a drive): start the library on a computer with internet, open ⚙️ Settings → A bigger map and press Download it. It adds roads and topo lines for a far wider area, in three levels: full detail at home, every street and trail in the country round it, and main roads, towns and topo lines beyond that. The Settings page says what it covers and how big it is (several GB, and some hours). If it stops part way, press Download it again and it carries on. Do this before the drive goes into an ARK Vault. It has no turn-by-turn directions: for those, use OsmAnd (below).
To carry the map on a phone: while you have internet, open the library website, go to ⚙️ Offline and tap Also save the map (about 130 MB). Then it works anywhere, with the dot.
⚠️ A map is not a promise. A wild-food sighting says someone saw the plant there once: check any plant or mushroom in the guides before eating it. Old mines are dangerous: stay out of shafts and tunnels. Wells are from old drilling reports and may be dry or gone. Road, gate and timber records are the agencies' own and can be years old: a road shown open may be washed out or gated. Frost pockets are worked out from the shape of the ground, as a guide.
Property lines and owners come from the county assessor's tax-lot map. The lines can be off by many feet and are not a survey: don't use them to settle where a boundary is. Owners are as recorded when the map was made; land changes hands.
.obf.zip) to the phone. For Oregon, that's the files starting with Us_oregon.Nothing to install.
VIEW-MAPS-ON-PC.The first time uses a lot of free space (about 30 GB for the whole USA, much less for Oregon). The installer left that space empty on purpose.
Terminal, press Return).bash (with a space), drag VIEW-MAPS-ON-PC.sh (in OsmAnd → MapViewer-Desktop) into the window, and press Return.This file is only on drives that were made on a Mac or Linux computer.
The point-and-click installer offers only the USA, Oregon and California, or Oregon. For anywhere else, run the installer script from the kit's files folder with a region:
# Windows (PowerShell)
./Get-OfflineLibrary.ps1 -Destination "E:\" -Region France
# Mac / Linux
./get-offline-library.sh -d /Volumes/MYDRIVE --region FranceA region can be a country, a continent (Europe), part of a country (US_texas) or world. Add -ListRegions (Windows) or --list-regions (Mac/Linux) to see the names.
Keep a paper map as a backup too. Electronics fail.