Norman B. Leventhal Map Center

The Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library is a special collections center in Boston, Massachusetts with research, educational, and exhibition programs relating to historical geography. It is the steward of the Boston Public Library’s map collection, consisting of approximately a quarter million geographic objects, including maps, atlases, globes, ephemera, and geographic data. It is located in the McKim Building of the Central Library in Copley Square.

Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center
Entrance
Housed atBoston Public Library
CuratorsGarrett Dash Nelson
Websitehttps://leventhalmap.org
Location in Boston

The center was founded in 2004 with a $10 million endowment as a public-private partnership between the Boston Public Library (BPL) and map collector and philanthropist Norman B. Leventhal.[1][2]


About the collection
Gallery

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 to the present, and geographically cover the world, with a focus on Boston and New England. The center also holds depository library maps and atlases produced by federal, state, and local agencies, as well as data sets used in geographic information systems.

Four named collections of distinction include:

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:

  • Bending Lines: Maps and Data from Distortion Deception (May 2020 – present)
  • 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.[3] In 2013, the center received a $40,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to promote digital access to 3,000 cartographic images held by multiple institutions that document the period of the American Revolutionary War (1750-1800).[4] Digital collections appear in an online repository built on the Blacklight search interface, a custom discovery tool called Atlascope, and on the Internet Archive.

Selected Publications


A small sample of maps in the collection.

  • World Map by Claudius Ptolemy, 1482
  • World Map by Hartmann Schedel, 1493
  • World Map by Martin Waldseemèuller, 1513
  • World Map by Abraham Ortelius, 1570
  • Paris by Louis Bretez, 1739

References
  1. Kahn, Joseph (3 January 2011). "BPL charts modern course". The Boston Globe. Retrieved 12 February 2015.
  2. Thomas C. Palmer Jr., "Maps lead to a public jewel," Boston Globe, 6 September 2007 (2 July 2008)
  3. Andrew Ryan, "By Web, a Detailed look at our past," The Boston Globe, 24 March 2007, p B10.
  4. "Grant Awards and Offers, April 2013" (PDF). National Endowment for the Humanities. Retrieved 12 February 2015.

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