Library Briefings

Antique African maps online

Since its inception in 1954, the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies at Northwestern University—the largest separate collection of Africana in existence—has been building its collection of antique African maps dating back as far as 1530. Now the Library has made digitized copies of these rare and unique maps available to African scholars worldwide, on a website that lets users view them in minute detail and download them. “This is our most valuable map collection,” says Beth Clausen, head of NUL’s Government and Geographic Information and Data Services department. “There are plenty of detailed maps of Europe from the 16th and 17th centuries in existence, but relatively few of Africa, which hadn’t yet been explored by many Western cartographers.”

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 Herskovits Library curator David Easterbrook, “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, 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,” Clausen 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,” Easterbrook says. “We see that as one of the major benefits of all the digitization projects we’re involved in.”