The Norman B Leventhal Map & Education Center Inc

Collections: The Center stewards the cartographic collections of the Boston Public Library, encompassing a quarter million maps and other objects, ensuring the preservation, cataloging, organization and digitization of the collection. Areas of particular strength are our four "Collections of Distinction": Boston & New England, the American Revolutionary era, urban maps and maritime maps. Public access is a major part of our mission and we offer reference services for the collection including assistance in geographic information services (GIS) and support fellowships to carry out research in the collection to develop new scholarship.The Center also has an extensive digital resources available on our website for public and educational use, increasing access to our collections and educational materials. Our digital collection includes 12,000 digitized maps including our American Revolutionary War era cross-institutional collection of more than 2,000 digitized maps from partner institutions such as the British Library and Library of Congress. Many digitized maps have been georeferenced, enabling overlays of modern maps, and some are also mosaicked and tiled to enhance digital access. This includes maps from our urban atlas collection, which can be explored as overlays of different maps over time using our mobile app/web tool Atlascope. In addition, all past and current exhibitions are available in digital form on our website. Digitized material from our collections has been used in numerous web and print publications and digital humanities projects.

Exhibitions and Public Outreach: The Center has presented 26 exhibitions since 2004. Exhibitions have traveled to New York, Washington DC, and Williamsburg as well as to other locations within the city of Boston. Showcasing items from the collection, exhibitions have highlighted such important subjects as the Revolutionary War and Civil War periods, 19th and 20th century immigration, voting patterns and rights, women's role in cartography, mapping of climate patterns, urban green spaces and U.S. westward expansion in the 19th century. Audiences upwards of 60,000 attend each gallery exhibition, including area residents, library patrons, tourists, researchers, students and teachers.All exhibitions are accompanied by a series of lectures and panel discussions with scholars and authors that explore themes related to the exhibition, with emphasis on relevance to contemporary issues. In addition, local micro-history and geography are explored in community events that use our Atlascope tool. Community partnerships add breadth and depth to both public and educational program offerings, including partnerships with faculty from area universities, and staff of municipal and non-profit organizations.