From 400-year-old globes to cosmic shrouds: A Maine library brings maps to life

PORTLAND, Maine — For many people, GPS has been a sport changer – a faucet, a voice, a turn-by-turn path, will get you there. However there’s something particular a few bodily map that the GPS in your automobile or telephone simply cannot present.
 
When laid out, a bodily map can present a higher sense of scale and place, hints on the attract of far-off lands, and a reminder that we’re a small a part of an enormous world with a fancy historical past.

A Library that lets college students deal with historical past

College students from the category Geography 370: Maps, Territory, and Energy discover the gallery exhibition Founding Recollections: America at 250 on view by way of June 2016.

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That is one thing that is revealed to college students on the Osher Map Library and Smith Heart for Cartographic Schooling, on the College of Southern Maine in Portland.   
 
College students can view maps and globes, each fashionable and a few going again tons of of years, from all around the world. Lots of the maps put Europe as the focus, some have been drawn earlier than America was even mapped, giving the scholars a distinct perspective and orientation.

Yaggy’s Geographical Research was printed in Chicago in 1887 and used instructing aids for nineteenth century school rooms with interactive layers. The library has many celestial charts and globes within the assortment.

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Shauna Martel, a instructing assistant on the Osher Map Library twirls an enormous globe round and factors to Australia.
 
“If you go to Australia,” she tells a gaggle of fourth graders, “they flip the map upside down so Australia is up on top versus like North America.”

Renee Keul, Assistant Director for Schooling and Outreach on the map library, says the youngsters coming in positively know what maps are.
 

Renee Keul, Assistant Director for Schooling and Outreach, and Dr. Libby Bischof, Government Director, show a cartographic sport. The maps within the assortment are allowed to be touched and interacted with.

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“What’s interesting is they very much see a map as something that is empirically true because we’re so used to satellite maps and Google Maps where the information is most likely true,” she says.
 
The library makes clear that lots of the maps weren’t correct to start with.

“To understand that they’re limited to the perspective of the map maker is kind of our first challenge when we’re working with old maps.“
 
Maps are personalized for every class. As much as 13,000 college students — from Ok to 12, in addition to college — undergo the Osher Map Library yearly.

The Smith Household Globe Assortment accommodates a lot of terrestrial and celestial globes.

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Libby Bischof, the Government Director of the Osher Map Library and Smith Heart for Cartographic Schooling says the 2 founding donor households – L.C. Smith and Eleanor Houston Smith, and Harold and Peggy Osher — needed a second grader to have the ability to are available and see the oldest map.

“They wanted maps … infused into every aspect of the curriculum,” Bischof says, including that simply over the previous 12 months, the library labored with over 32 totally different disciplines.

“Anything from history to environmental science to nursing to social work and everything in between astronomy, biology, honors programs, sociology,” she says.

A pupil from the category Geography 370: Maps, Territory, and Energy explains their undertaking regarding maps.

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Bischof says quite a lot of establishments have archives and collections that rightly sit in vaults, protected.
 
“But the point here is to get them out and to use them and to make a new generation really excited about historic objects and historic materials.“

Since 2018, Dr. Libby Bischof, has served because the Government Director of the Osher Map Library and Smith Heart for Cartographic Schooling. She additionally has a background in Maine historical past and the historical past of visible arts.

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She says the Osher Map library is likely one of the largest within the nation by way of a map assortment that is open and accessible to the general public.
 
“We have about half a million maps, cartographic items, globes, atlas books … dating back to 1475.”

Mapping energy, politics and perspective

Loupes can be found to assist researchers and college students view the map.

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The library’s huge assortment of uncommon and strange maps is a boon for Matthew Edney, the college scholar on the Osher Map Library who teaches a college course on world historical past.
 
“I set it through the lens of how have different cultures mapped their worlds, thinking of world as a cultural phenomenon, not just a physical thing,” he says.
 
Maps additionally replicate energy, ambition and targets of varied peoples and governments – assume Gulf of Mexico versus Gulf of America.
 
One map on the Osher Library — titled Uprooted Individuals of the USA — was produced in 1945 by Louise Jefferson, a black graphic designer and cartographer. It is a brilliant, colourful illustration of the widespread displacement within the U.S. at the moment, says Bischof.

Along with maps, globes, and cartographic ephemera, the library homes – as could also be anticipated – many books and atlases.

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“You have refugees from Europe … You have all sorts of men and women going to fight and serve in the Army and Navy being moved to train,” she says.

Bischof says the social historical past map additionally reveals Japanese internment camps on the west coast.
 
“You see the barbed wire and barracks,” she says. “Not a lot of people would map this during the time.”
 
The Osher library has a really broad view of what defines a map. One — titled Willard’s Tempe of Time — charts the idea of time again to the creation.

A Braille map of the state of Maine for the visually impaired.

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There are celestial maps, and books like the Nuremberg Chronicle, which is a historical past of the world. It’s a full and intact leather-bound tome from 1493. Its thick pages are made out of rags. The library permits folks to the touch it, with out gloves, really feel the paper made tons of of years in the past.
 
Louis Miller is a librarian at Osher says the Nuremburg Chronicle accommodates greater than 1800 woodcut illustrations of cities. He would not take into account your complete e-book a map, however says the finely detailed views of the cities and constructing are positively maps. Miller says a forerunner, in the event you like, for what we use now.
 
“Anything that Google is doing now with Street View, things like that, is borrowing off of a convention that maps have been using for hundreds and hundreds of years.”

Treasures from attics and breezways

David Neikirk, Digital Imaging Coordinator, left, and Paul Fuller, Coordinator of Digital Collections and Digital Initiatives, proper, with a newly-acquired Jain Cosmology Map from India from 1830.

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One of many latest maps on the library is a big piece of material from India which was worn by a member of the Jain faith as they lay dying. It is a mixture of pale blues, greens and saffron, exhibiting land and rivers and mountains.
 
“The cloth was a cosmological map of the entirety of creation and human divine relationships,” says Edney.
 
Edney calls it “stunning” and says it should add to his supplies for instructing about South Asian historical past.
 
The Osher Map Library actively searches for and buys maps so as to add to their instructing assortment. And there are some sudden finds.

A closeup exhibiting the material of the newly-acquired Jain Cosmology Map from India from 1830.

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Edney says he had lengthy coveted a Yaggy Geographical Research set of 1887. They have been designed as instructing aids for nineteenth century school rooms.
 
Edney says a Yaggy would come up often for public sale, however the library was at all times outbid. Then at some point it confirmed up.
 
“A woman was cleaning out her uncle’s house in central north Maine, and it was in the rafters of the breezeway,” he says. The girl approached the Maine Historic Society they usually pointed her in direction of the Osher Map Library.
 
“And voila, we have it,” says Edney. He says it’s a “gorgeous” celestial map exhibiting the heavens and the orbits of the planets. 

Bischof says you by no means know when a map goes to look — from map sellers, the nook of the attic, a forgotten field — however when it does it turns into greater than a bit of paper — it is an perception into historical past and cultures — and a glimpse at how folks have seen and imagined their world.

An artwork set up by artist Adrienne Ottenberg Portraits with Maps: Independence and Betrayal in Maine within the foyer space of the library.

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