Blog Posts by Subject: Maps, Atlases, Cartography

As an Armenian-American keenly aware of the devotion to lost homeland of my ethnic compatriots, I’ve always been on the lookout for Armenians among the researchers from many large ethnic groups who have found their way to the Map Division. April 24 is the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the Armenian Genocide, and one way to honor those who were not able to find refuge is to learn all we can about them and celebrate our link to them.

Comment créer vos propres cartes géo-référencées à l’aide d’outils Web gratuits.

We can gain a deep understanding of the development of the city’s public transit infrastructure simply by examining nine maps published between 1845 and 1921.

Una guía para trabajar con varias herramientas web gratuitas para que puedas hacer tus propios mapas interactivos.

Between January 1978 and April 1979, Nooney networked her way through Brooklyn documenting residences and their occupants, asking each for a referral to another willing subject. Over 150 families or individuals entrusted her to capture glimpses into their private worlds and personal tastes.

A primer on working with various free web mapping tools so you can make your own awesome maps.

Come to the Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division to view three examples that demonstrate the role that maps play, years after their informational current-events function, in documenting histories of changing boundaries.

Nearly one hundred land auctioneering pamphlets from the 1860s to 1920s and covering the Bronx, Manhattan, and Brooklyn were digitized this past year. With their richly designed covers, these promotional brochures provide modern day researchers with a window onto neighborhood development and changing patterns of land use in the city.

NYPL Labs is pleased to announce the Library's first-ever Net Artist Residency, in partnership with local hardware startup Electric Objects.

As a web developer who works on a screen and an illustrator that works on paper, I have always admired those who could paint big—often on impossibly large and inconveniently placed walls—only to be erased in a matter of weeks or days. The ephemeral nature of street art is what makes it simultaneously appealing and frustrating as a viewer. However, Google Maps recently rolled out a feature allowing users to go back in 

At a recent internal hacking event here, NYPL Labs developer Paul Beaudoin recruited me into an interesting project: transforming one of the library's 20,000 digitized historical maps into the three-dimensional world of the building game Minecraft.

Reconnecting the veterans' testimonies with physical structures and topography of the battlefield, Thatcher improved the understanding of troop movements during this important Civil War clash. Recently, I spoke with Thatcher about her project and the use of archival resources, including the Ezra A. Carman papers here in the Manuscripts and Archives Division.

A walk in the woods, a guy with a rake... history uncovered.

The Lionel Pincus & Princess Firyal Map Division is very proud to announce the release of more than 20,000 cartographic works as high resolution downloads. We believe these maps have no known US copyright restrictions.*

A few weeks ago, we launched Building Inspector, NYPL Labs' latest tool for opening up historical maps of New York City. In that time, you (and lots of other Inspectors) have helped unlock an era of Manhattan's past, generating a building-level snapshot of the city 150 years ago that modern mapping tools can make use of.

Hooray! You did it! We did it (we're really hooked too). To celebrate the completion of the 1857 Manhattan Atlas, we've got some exciting news:

We're 

By 1900, New York City and the United States were undergoing waves of dramatic, traumatic change. Industrialization, Reconstruction and a surge of immigrants from across the globe were remaking every aspect of life, from transportation to education, leisure, labor, race relations and the status of women. One response to the dislocations and turmoil of this era was the reform efforts that we now classify as the “Progressive Movement.”

Over a century ago, The New York Public Library was founded with a basic purpose: to provide free access to information, literature, and cultural resources for the enjoyment and enrichment of all New Yorkers.

In the late 19th century, this meant accumulating vast collections spanning all subjects and languages, erecting beautiful buildings to store these books, and hiring brilliant, dedicated librarians to serve them to the public. But what would it look like if we founded The New York Public Library today?

Look around you and you’ll notice that 

Something MAPnificent is happening at Mulberry Street Library through August 27, 2012. MAPnificent features paintings, works on paper and sculpture that reflect the artists' concerns for the current state of our society, conveyed though charts and diagrams, and their admiration of the map as a symbol of longing and the unknown. Includes works by Elaine Angelopoulos, Joseph Burwell, Marie Christine Katz, Paul Fabozzi, Peter J. Hoffmeister, Alastair Nobel, and Amy Pryor.

The mastermind 

In 2010, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) awarded The New York Public Library's Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division a three-year grant for its New York City Historical Geographic Information Systems project, which builds digital cartographic resources from NYPL's historical paper map and atlas