The Geography and Map Division maintains more than one hundred non-circulating collections that document the history of cartography. These collections were acquired through gifts, purchases, transfers, or organized by a division specialist under a common theme or provenance. We refer to these collections as Special Collections. The holdings provide geographical coverage of the entire world; however, the coverage is predominantly of North and South America. Subject coverage includes, but is not limited to, exploration, military operations, and settlement. The map shown below is an example of one map from the William McKinley map collection, a Special Collection held in the division.
Each individual collection may include hundreds or even thousands of maps, manuscripts, papers, photographs, artifacts, and books, which must be arranged, described, and preserved. Once the collection has been processed, it will be cataloged and may have a finding aid published online to facilitate its discovery and access for researchers.
Our finding aids provide a searchable text of the collection. The text includes a summary, the scope of content, which describes individuals and parties involved, outlines how the collection was organized and arranged, and what kinds of objects are included in the collection in the form of a contents list.
Our division recently published finding aids for the following Special Collections:
Commander Royal Lovell collection, 1944. Lovell commanded LST Group 50 during the Operation Neptune D-Day landings at Normandy, France during the Second World War. The collection includes four maps, a monograph, a report, a set of planning documents, and personnel files.
G. Malcolm Lewis collection of cartographic activities of the North American Indian and Inuit peoples at the Library of Congress, 1972-2000. This collection documents the historical geography research activities of G. Malcolm Lewis. It includes cartobibliographic summaries of Indigenous mapping of North America, accounts of Indigenous maps, and reproductions of the maps when available.
Dayton Accords map collection, 1995. This collection includes maps made to use for peace negotiations between representatives of Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia, held at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio. It includes 83 maps.
World War II unit route maps collection, 1944-1945. This collection includes maps created by individual U.S. military units commemorating and outlining their movements, engagements, and routes of travel during the second World War. It includes 85 maps.
Descriptions of Special Collections can also be searched with other Library materials in the LC Catalog. For example, view the catalog record of the Commander Royal Lovell collection, 1944. Scroll down to find the link to the finding aid in the catalog record (under the Links field). Note that you can also find the the link to the catalog record in the finding aid.