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. 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. 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 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: Digital collections. The center offers digital collections consisting of more than 10,000 objects, primarily with rights status in the public domain. 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). Digital collections appear in an online repository built on the Blacklight search interface, a  custom discovery tool called Atlascope, and on the Internet Archive. Gallery. A small sample of maps in the collection.