Launch of Online African Maps Collection Makes Worldwide Splash

When word of the Library’s new online collection of antique African maps was released to the media on January 8th, public response was immediate—and worldwide. BBC radio, CNN, and Voice of America all taped interviews with Herskovits Library Curator David Easterbrook. “I am fascinated by the fact that not only was the response immediate but that it was from sources focused on delivering news worldwide, not merely within the US,” David says. “The CNN call, for example, came from CNN in London. So far as I am aware the only purely domestic interest to date came from The Daily Northwestern.”

“This is our most valuable map collection,” says Beth Clausen, head of Government and Geographic Information and Data Services, “and during the seven years we’ve had it all locked up in our drawers, maybe two or three people have asked to see them. That’s the beauty of digitization, because since this was announced, we’ve had hundreds of thousands of hits on the web site.”

For scholars, the value of the maps is as much in the cartographers’ perceptions of Africa as in the quality of the information they preserved. “The cartographers had a rough idea of what these places were and where they were,” says David, “but at the same time they were often guessing, and some of the maps are quite fanciful. They’re often full of little flourishes, drawings of topographical features and people and animals.”

The maps digitization project, Beth says, was a collaborative effort by “many in the Library and a few from Academic Technologies,” including Stu Baker, Steve DiDomenico, Volodymyr Karpenko, Virginia Kerr, and—co-ordinating all of it, Claire Stewart.

The maps, which were scanned at 600 ppi resolution, are delivered through the Library’s new Fedora digital repository and the Aware JPEG2000 image server. Users can search the website by date or browse the collection by criteria such as title, date, or cartographer. The website supplies both a thumbnail view of the whole map and an adjustable high-resolution viewer that zooms in on smaller segments and details. “The quality of the scanning is so good that you can actually see the threads in the linen papers on these images, details you wouldn’t be able to see without a magnifying glass if they were actually out on a table in front of you,” Beth says.

High-resolution TIFFs can be downloaded from the site for free. “We’re especially excited that we can make this material freely available to scholars in Africa,” David says. “We see that as one of the major benefits of all the digitization projects we’re involved in.”