The Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library is a special collections center in

Boston, Massachusetts Boston is the capital and most populous city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the United States. The city serves as the cultural and Financial centre, financial center of New England, a region of the Northeas ...

with research, educational, and exhibition programs relating to

historical geography Historical geography is the branch of geography that studies the ways in which geographic phenomena have changed over time. In its modern form, it is a synthesizing discipline which shares both topical and methodological similarities with histor ...

. It is the steward of the

Boston Public Library The Boston Public Library is a municipal public library system in Boston, Massachusetts, founded in 1848. The Boston Public Library is also Massachusetts' Library for the Commonwealth (formerly ''library of last recourse''), meaning all adult re ...

’s

map collection A map collection or map library is a storage facility for maps, usually in a library, archive, or museum, or at a map publisher or public-benefit corporation, and the maps and other cartographic items stored within that facility. Sometimes, ...

, consisting of approximately a quarter million geographic objects, including

map A map is a symbolic depiction of interrelationships, commonly spatial, between things within a space. A map may be annotated with text and graphics. Like any graphic, a map may be fixed to paper or other durable media, or may be displayed on ...

atlas An atlas is a collection of maps; it is typically a bundle of world map, maps of Earth or of a continent or region of Earth. Advances in astronomy have also resulted in atlases of the celestial sphere or of other planets. Atlases have traditio ...

es,

globe A globe is a spherical Earth, spherical Model#Physical model, model of Earth, of some other astronomical object, celestial body, or of the celestial sphere. Globes serve purposes similar to maps, but, unlike maps, they do not distort the surface ...

ephemera Ephemera are items which were not originally designed to be retained or preserved, but have been collected or retained. The word is etymologically derived from the Greek ephēmeros 'lasting only a day'. The word is both plural and singular. On ...

, and geographic data. It is located in the McKim Building of the Central Library in Copley Square. The center was founded in 2004 with a $10 million endowment as a public-private partnership between the

(BPL) and map collector and philanthropist Norman B. Leventhal.Thomas C. Palmer Jr.
"Maps lead to a public jewel,"
''Boston Globe'', 6 September 2007 (2 July 2008)

About the collection

The center manages the geographic collections of the Boston Public Library as well as material collected by Norman B. Leventhal during his lifetime, known as the Mapping Boston Collection. Its holdings stretch chronologically from the

15th century The 15th century was the century which spans the Julian calendar dates from 1 January 1401 (represented by the Roman numerals MCDI) to 31 December 1500 (MD). In Europe, the 15th century includes parts of the Late Middle Ages, the Early Re ...

to the present, and geographically cover the world, with a focus on Boston and

New England New England is a region consisting of six states in the Northeastern United States: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. It is bordered by the state of New York (state), New York to the west and by the ...

. The center also holds

depository library Legal deposit is a legal requirement that a person or group submit copies of their publications to a repository, usually a library. The number of copies required varies from country to country. Typically, the national library is the primary reposit ...

maps and atlases produced by federal, state, and local agencies, as well as data sets used in

geographic information system A geographic information system (GIS) consists of integrated computer hardware and Geographic information system software, software that store, manage, Spatial analysis, analyze, edit, output, and Cartographic design, visualize Geographic data ...

s. Four named collections of distinction include: *

American Revolutionary War The American Revolutionary War (April 19, 1775 – September 3, 1783), also known as the Revolutionary War or American War of Independence, was the armed conflict that comprised the final eight years of the broader American Revolution, in which Am ...

-Era Maps * Boston and New England Maps * Maritime

Charts A chart (sometimes known as a graph) is a graphical representation for data visualization, in which "the data is represented by symbols, such as bars in a bar chart, lines in a line chart, or slices in a pie chart". A chart can represent t ...

and Atlases * Urban Maps Portions of the Mapping Boston Collection are on exhibit and available for viewing at the Boston Harbor Hotel and the Langham Hotel.

Exhibitions

Notable exhibitions at the center have included:
Getting Around Town: Four Centuries of Mapping Boston in Transit
(September 9, 2023 — April 27, 2024)
Building Blocks: Boston Stories From Urban Atlases
(January 2023 – Present)
More or Less in Common: Environment and Justice in the Human Landscape
(March 2022 – December 2022)
Bending Lines: Maps and Data from Distortion Deception
(May 2020 – February 2022)
America Transformed: Mapping the 19th Century
(May 2019 – May 2020)
Breathing Room: Mapping Boston's Green Spaces
(March – September 2018)
Women in Cartography: Five Centuries of Accomplishments
(October 2015 – March 2016)
We Are One: Mapping America's Road from Revolution to Independence
(May – November 2015)
Torn in Two: The 150th Anniversary of the Civil War
(May – December 2011)

Digital collections

The center offers digital collections consisting of more than 10,000 objects, primarily with rights status in the

public domain The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no Exclusive exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly Waiver, waived, or may be inapplicable. Because no one holds ...

.Andrew Ryan, "By Web, a Detailed look at our past," ''The Boston Globe'', 24 March 2007, p B10. In 2013, the center received a $40,000 grant from the

National Endowment for the Humanities The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is an independent federal agency of the U.S. government, established by thNational Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965(), dedicated to supporting research, education, preserv ...

to promote digital access to 3,000 cartographic images held by multiple institutions that document the period of the

(1750-1800). Digital collections appear in a
online repository
built on the

Blacklight A blacklight, also called a UV-A light, Wood's lamp, or ultraviolet light, is a lamp that emits long-wave ( UV-A) ultraviolet light and very little visible light. One type of lamp has a violet filter material, either on the bulb or in a se ...

search interface, a custom discovery tool calle
Atlascope
and on the

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American 501(c)(3) organization, non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including web ...

Selected publications

* ''America Transformed: Mapping the 19th Century'' (2019
OCLC: 1126349476
* ''We Are One: Mapping America's Road from Revolution to Independence'' (2015
OCLC: 918876662
* ''Torn in Two: 150th Anniversary of the Civil War'
OCLC: 726743324

Gallery

A small sample of maps in the collection. Cosmographia._-_Norman_B._Leventhal_Map_Center_at_the_BPL.jpg, World Map by Claudius Ptolemy, 1482 Secunda_etas_mundi_%3D_-_Norman_B._Leventhal_Map_Center_at_the_BPL.jpg, World Map by Hartmann Schedel, 1493 Orbis_typus_uniuersalis_iuxta_hydrographorum_traditionem_-_Norman_B._Leventhal_Map_Center_at_the_BPL.jpg, World Map by Martin Waldseemèuller, 1513 Typus_orbis_terrarum_-_Norman_B._Leventhal_Map_Center_at_the_BPL.jpg, World Map by Abraham Ortelius, 1570 Turgot map of Paris, sheet 18-19 - Norman B. Leventhal Map Center.jpg, Paris by Louis Bretez, 1739

References

External links

* *
Digital Collections portal

Atlascope portal

Atlases and books digitized by the Internet Archive

Norman B. Leventhal Map Center photos on Flickr
{{coord, 42, 20, 57.55, N, 71, 4, 41.78, W, display=title Cultural history of Boston Public libraries in Massachusetts Copley Square Map collections Boston Public Library