IRIS Photos

The Map & Geospatial Information Collection

Bill Kibbee

“I love maps!”

All of us in the Map Collection hear this any time we tell someone where we work.  With their visual appeal and the peculiar way they engage our imaginations, maps are a universally popular information medium.

Cornell is fortunate to have a large and eclectic collection of maps, globes, atlases, digital maps, and other cartographic resources.  By far the largest physical repository is the Map and Geospatial Information Collection (M&GIC) on the lower level of Olin Library, home to around 250,000 paper maps, a thousand atlases, and several hundred CD-ROMs.

The map collection is grounded on the 100,000 United States Geologic Survey (USGS) topographic quadrangles, the familiar “topo quads” that provide detailed representations of the topography of the United States from the 1880s to the present.  The collection is not at all limited to USGS quads, but covers the entire world and a wide variety of themes: topography, but also geology, land use, hydrography, transportation, energy resources, linguistics, history and politics, and many others.  The array of cartographic media that present this information challenges staff and patrons at every turn.  We have major sets of nineteenth-century European maps in microform, for example; globes of the moon and the earth’s tectonic plates, over two hundred rolled wall maps, CD-ROMs of aerial photographs and census boundaries, and atlases of every shape, age, and description.

Who Uses the Collection?
Students in Architecture and City and Regional Planning certainly make the biggest impact.  They invade the Map Collection at the beginning of every semester to undertake site analyses for their projects.  There are dozens of groups looking for maps, aerial photographs, and digital maps of sites all over the world: Pyongyang, North Korea; Nara Prefecture, Japan; Mexico City, Mexico. Many groups work on Manhattan and Brooklyn, using the very detailed Sanborn Fire Insurance maps in print and online, historical maps in the collection, a CD set of very high resolution aerial photographs, and more.  They keep our single scanner working continuously and beat a well-worn path to Photocopy Services (our maps don’t circulate).

Other popular sites for investigation are Tompkins County, Ithaca, and the Cornell Campus itself.  We have an impressive collection of local resources, and that draws many local users to the collection also—engineers, planners, genealogists.

Saint Law
A map from a nineteenth-century landownership atlas of St. Lawerence County.  These are very popular with historians and genealogists.

The faculty, too, make extensive use of the collection.  Among our recent visitors were Oren Falk, a specialist on the Vikings, who was looking for maps and aerial photographs of a particular valley in Iceland; Wayles Browne, in Linguistics, looking for Albanian maps to identify and correctly name places in a novel he is translating; Kim Bostwick, the Bird and Mammal Curator of the Cornell Museum of Vertebrates, looking for maps of northern Argentina to plan a collecting expedition; and Joel Silbey and Hunter Rawlings, who needed a map of Gettysburg for a class in Cornell’s Adult University.

GIS and Digital Maps
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is a set of computerized tools and programs used to analyze and present geographic information.  We provide two GIS workstations in the Map Collection and a great deal of digitized information for GIS users.  The Map Librarian offers some consulting and two introductory workshops.  Boris Michev is quickly developing the skills that will allow us to do more-informed consulting and help people find digital mapping resources more efficiently.  And this year we’re lucky to have Lacy Swanson, who spent the summer working on a major GIS project in St. Paul, Minnesota, as a student map assistant.

We’re fortunate to be able to refer users with complex GIS projects to Mann Library’s Gail Steinhart and Jeff Piestrak.  Mann also hosts Cornell University Geospatial Information Repository (CUGIR), a repository of GIS data for New York State, and offers a series of workshops that complement our own.

Much more could be written about GIS and the uses made of it by researchers around campus.  Below is a sample of a simple map created to test the feasibility of using GIS to display this particular kind of data successfully.

aboliton
A straightforward use of GIS to group and plot a database of abolitionist chapters and their founding dates

Maps Online
“Isn’t all that stuff online now?”

That’s the second most common exclamation after “I love maps.”

The short answer is “No way, not by a long shot.”  Another short answer might be: “Good luck!”  The sheer amount of cartographic material online seems to grow exponentially each week.  But like many Web resources, online maps can be difficult to discover and use. 

One easy road to discovery is our department Web page. You’ll be impressed with what’s out there, but if you have a specific project in mind, looking for resources online can be challenging.  We try to help patrons with that challenge by providing an organized list of links from our page.  As heavily used as this page is, it’s no substitute for our own knowledge of sites, and we are frequently called upon to help patrons discover the appropriate source.  Still, the best map for a research project is most often in a Map Collection drawer.

Two sources we all recommend are Google Maps and Google Earth (requires a download).  Google Earth in particular can be quite addictive.  But for a longer, more-thoughtful answer, we’ll need another Inside CUL article to talk about GIS, digital mapping, and the explosion of Web mapping tools and resources.

Exhibits
Exhibits are an important part of the Map Collection’s public face.  We try to design displays that are eye-catching and engaging, and that suggest to viewers cartographic resources that might be available for their own research.

Over the past year we’ve mounted displays on “Local History and Genealogy” and “GIS at Work.”  One of our most popular displays was “Things Fall Apart,” which was designed to help readers participating in the Cornell Reading Project understand the geographical setting of Chinua Achebe’s novel.  Some of the displayed maps were also featured on the project Web site.

As you read this, we’ll be putting up, as our next display, a “map annex” to the very impressive exhibit in Rare and Manuscript Collections (RMC), “Enduring Peoples, Vanished Worlds,” just as we mounted a display of maps of Joycean Dublin for the Joyce Conference and prizewinning exhibit.  Our display will be “Native Americans: The Cartographic Tradition.”  It will feature maps scanned from books in the Huntington Free Library collection (the collection on which the RMC exhibit is based), along with other maps illuminating various facets of Native American history and culture.

Behind the Scenes
M&GIC is administratively within the Department of Preservation and Collection Maintenance (PCM), and our displays have benefited from our close collaboration with PCM.  Pat Fox, in particular, has been a huge help.  Susann Argetsinger, who is both an assistant in the Map Collection and a conservation technician, has become our display specialist.  Susann also plays a major role in maintaining the physical map collection, making minor repairs, refoldering, encapsulating vulnerable maps, and choosing material for more-intense treatment from our team of gifted conservators.

The maps and atlases in the collection, and many online resources, can be located through the online catalog.  This is an important advantage of the Cornell map collection that is far from universal.  The indefatigable Howard Brentlinger does the pre-cataloging and processing of the collection.  Howard organizes the processing workflow and works closely with a team of copy catalogers in Library Technical Services (LTS) and Nancy Holcomb, who does original cataloging for maps.

Howard recently tackled a major project involving the Sparks Collection of Revolutionary War-era maps housed in RMC.  This famous collection of manuscript maps, which includes a hand-drawn map by George Washington, had lain uncataloged since its acquisition at auction in 1872.  Consulting with Margaret Nichols, of RMC, Howard prepared the provisional records, and Margaret completed them, allowing catalog access to this important collection.

Howard, Susann, and Boris train and coordinate our two student assistants, Lacy Swanson, a first-year graduate student in landscape architecture, and Sarah Herman, a graduating senior majoring in archaeology.  These two really keep the collection functioning, checking in maps and assisting in refoldering and many other projects.  Most of all, they provide basic reference service and refile maps, which on a busy day might number over a hundred.  M&GIC couldn’t function without them.

Love maps?  Come and visit.

Next: Native American Collection Processing Moves Forward in LTS