Category — Online Map Collections

David Rumsey is donating his collection of thousands of rare and historical American maps to Standford University.

Rumsey says one of the rarest maps that has been donated is Lewis & Clark’s map used during their journey through the upper Missouri and into Oregon published in 1814.

The collection of about 150,000 maps will go to Stanford Library’s Special Collections Division for preservation.

Rumsey has spent at least 30 years collecting rare and antique maps. About 18,000 of the maps digitized for online viewing at his web site http://www.davidrumsey.com.

Read the full story.

Edit: A more indepth story regarding the donation  is now available from The Imperial Valley News.

[tags]David Rumsey, antique maps, antique map collections, lewis and clark[/tags]

The newly redesigned Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library website is ready for viewing.

Some of the changes on the new site include:

1. The website’s Zoomify feature in View Collection has been upgraded and improved.
2. You can now access our Teacher Resources by creating a search across multiple portals of educational levels, topics, ideas and skills.
3. Two new Maps in the News current events features with articles detailing Bolivia and New Orleans are now available with their related Teacher Resources.
4. An engaging, educational, and interactive Virtual Tour for our current exhibit Boston & Beyond has been uploaded to the site with its related Teacher Resources. You are now able to download PDF’s of maps that are out of copyright (pre-1923) for insertion into reports or power point presentations.
5. In May, you will be able to buy a map reproductions on line.

View the updated Norman B. Leventhal Map Center website. 

Via: MapHist

[tags]Norman B. Leventhal Map Center, Boston Public Library, antique maps, online map collections[/tags]

It’s Pittsburgh’s 250th Anniversary this year and as part of the celebrations, a number of maps have been assembled and scanned for online viewing at Pittsburgh 250: Maps from 1759 to Almost Now.

General John Forbes bestowed the name on the Forks of the Ohio in November, 1758, after chasing out the French & Indians and occupying an abandoned Fort Duquesne. The name honors William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, and head of government at the time. This selection of maps and views presents a history of the city and region from that moment to near the present; some can be seen on other pages of this website.

As noted on the above web site, Historic Pittsburgh has even more maps of Pittsburgh available for searching and viewing online. Of particular interest are the maps from the 1872 G. M. Hopkins Pittsburgh atlas

Via: MapHist

[tags]Pittsburg 250th Anniversary, antique maps, online maps of Pittsburgh, historic maps of Pittsburgh[/tags]

The Vermont State Archives is putting 18th Century maps online. People will get a chance to view them and, by putting them online, lawyers, surveyors, landowners and historians will be able to analyze old roads, boundary lines and titles.

The Minnesota Historical Society has also put old maps online where they act as tools for surveyors and other land professionals.

Read more about the projects in this article. 

Four of the maps in the Festival of Maps in Chicago are on loan from the American Geographical Society Library (AGSL). A press release from the University of Wisconsin – Milwalkee (which houses the American Geographical Society’s collection,) discusses not only the four items placed in the Festival of Maps, but how the AGSL collection holds more than a million items, half of which are maps and charts, some dating to 15th century, and some that aren’t available anywhere else, not even at the Library of Congress.

The press release notes:

Explorer-members, such as Charles Lindbergh, Robert Peary and Theodore Roosevelt, are among those who donated items associated with their exploits to the society over the years. Materials in the collection have been consulted not only by scholars, but also by the U.S. government during and at the end of both world wars. Today, it attracts scholars from as far away as Uzbekistan.

Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ) has announced the publication of a new atlas: Mapping a Continent: Historical Atlas of North America, 1492-1814:

Written by Jean-François Palomino, map librarian at BAnQ, and historians Raymonde Litalien and Denis Vaugeois, the work outlines the history of the continent and its cartographic representation. Featuring about 40 chapters on subjects as varied as Amerindian cartography, Acadia, North American place names, the Northwest Passage, the hydrography of the St. Lawrence, and England’s conquest of Canada, Mapping a Continent is superbly illustrated with some 200 old maps and prints, taken for the most part from BAnQ’s collections but also from several other famous collections from Canada, the United States and Europe.

Mapping a Continent: Historical Atlas of North America, 1492-1814 (cloth with dust jacket, 300 pages, colour throughout with index and bibliography) will be on sale for $89 at the Boutique of the Grande Bibliothèqueand in bookstores throughout Québec. The book is available in its original French version, La mesure d’un continent : atlas historique de l’Amérique du Nord, 1492-1814. The English version was translated by Kdthe Roth and jointly published with McGill-Queen’s University Press.