Map Collections: Online

"The David Rumsey Map Center opened on April 19th, 2016 in the Bing Wing of Green Library, Stanford University. The Center is a new collections-based resource designed to provide access to cartographic information in all of its forms, from paper to digital. It is a flexible and rich environment for research and teaching with large collection of rare atlases and maps, high-resolution screens equipped with interactive tools for viewing digital images, and knowledgeable staff."

"The David Rumsey Map Collection was founded in 1985 and went online in 1999 at davidrumsey.com. The collection includes over 200,000 rare 16th through 21st century maps of the entire World and parts of the Universe. 115,000 maps and related items are available online and 60,000 of those have been georeferenced. Rumsey has been donating the physical map collection and the digital database made from it to the David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford Libraries since 2008. The map center opened in 2016.The online map collection is a searchable database that allows you to make your own journeys into spatial representations of the past. Here you can see the history of cartography through primary sources from the present to centuries past. In 2022 Rumsey gave the entire digital collection to the Internet Archive to preserve and make available in the Archive's online library."

"The 28 historic maps in this digital collection provide a window into geo- and socio-political developments and changes within Texas, the cities of Houston (including selected sub-divisions) and Galveston, and regions beyond the state’s borders. Map dates range approximately from the first third of the 19th century through the first half of the 20th century.

Along with the maps of the City of Houston are specific detail maps of sub-division plats, including Camp Logan (1917), Central Park, Magnolia Park, Houston Heights, Rice Court, Shadow Lawn, Shadyside, and Southampton Place. Beyond the State of Texas itself, there are examples of Texas at the time of the 1836 revolution, a map including Indian Territory to the north (comprising present-day Oklahoma), a Map of the South West, which, besides Texas shows Arkansas, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Indian Territory, the states of northeastern Mexico, and the railroads traversing this large land mass. And depicting all the free and slave states and territories of the Union is Reynolds’s Political Map of the United States (1856) at the time of the second Missouri Compromise."

"The Japanese Historical Map Collection contains about 2,300 early maps of Japan and the World. The collection was acquired by the University of California from the Mitsui family in 1949, and is housed on the Berkeley campus in the C.V. Starr East Asian Library. Represented in this online collection are over 1,900 images of maps and books from this Collection."

Maps from the Kentucky Virtual Library Digital Collection.

"The Louisiana Sea Grant Digital Maps Collection, contains USGS maps and other maps of Louisiana. This project was a collaboration between Louisiana Sea Grant and the LSU Libraries."LOUISiana Digital Library

""The Louisiana State Museum's cartographic holdings, comprised of original works as well as photographic and facsimile reproductions, are dated 1525 to the present." LOUISiana Digital Library

This site features digital copies of 113 antique maps of Africa and accompanying text dating from the mid 16th Century to the early 20th Century. All scanned maps are authentic and originally collected by the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies (or the Africana Library) at Northwestern University.
Description from site

"... a comprehensive, online collection of historic maps of the Tar Heel State. Featuring maps from three of the state's largest map collections -- the North Carolina State Archives, the North Carolina Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill, and the Outer Banks History Center -- North Carolina Maps provides an unprecedented level of access to these materials. North Carolina Maps contains more than 3,000 maps, ranging in date from the late 1500s to 2000, and including detailed maps for each of North Carolina's one hundred counties. "

"It allows the user to search for online digital historical maps across numerous different collections via a geographical search. Search by typing a place-name or by clicking in the map window, and narrow by date. The search results provide a direct link to the map image on the website of the host institution."
The Great Britain Historical GIS Project based at The University of Portsmouth, UK and Klokan Technologies GmbH, Switzerland

"The Rochambeau Map Collection contains cartographic items used by Jean Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau (1725-1807), when he was commander in chief of the French expeditionary army (1780-82) during the American Revolution. The maps were from Rochambeau's personal collection, cover much of eastern North America, and date from 1717 to 1795. " American Memory from the Library of Congress

"More than 3,000 maps are currently available online. Most of them show Wisconsin locations, but many Renaissance and colonial-era maps of North America are also included."