PORTLAND, Maine — For many, GPS is a game changer: a tap, a voice, turn-by-turn directions. But a physical map offers something different — a sense of scale and place, the allure of far-off lands, and a reminder that we’re a small part of a big world with a complex history.
That perspective is part of the experience at the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education at the University of Southern Maine in Portland. Students can handle maps and globes, modern and centuries old, from around the world. Many older maps center Europe or were drawn before America was mapped, giving students different orientations and revealing the perspective of the mapmaker.
Shauna Martel, a teaching assistant, twirls a large globe for visiting fourth graders and points to Australia. “If you go to Australia,” she says, “they flip the map upside down so Australia is up on top versus like North America.” Renee Keul, assistant director for education and outreach, notes that kids know what maps are because of Google Maps, but the library shows many maps were never strictly “accurate.” The first lesson is that maps are limited to a maker’s perspective.
The Osher library customizes sessions for classes. Up to 13,000 students a year — from kindergarten through university — visit. Founding donors L.C. Smith and Eleanor Houston Smith, and Harold and Peggy Osher, wanted even a second grader to see the oldest map. Executive Director Libby Bischof says maps are meant to be infused into the curriculum; over the past year the library worked with more than 32 disciplines, from history and environmental science to nursing, social work, astronomy, biology and sociology.
Bischof says the Osher Map Library is among the largest in the country with a public-facing collection: about half a million maps, cartographic items, globes and atlases dating back to 1475. The goal is to get materials out from vaults and into use — to excite a new generation about historic objects.
Faculty scholar Matthew Edney uses the collection in a global history course, teaching how different cultures have mapped their worlds as cultural phenomena, not just physical spaces. Maps reflect power and ambition — consider naming disputes like Gulf of Mexico versus Gulf of America — and they chart social histories. One example in the collection is Louise Jefferson’s 1945 map “Uprooted People of the USA,” a colorful depiction of displacement in the U.S., showing refugees from Europe, servicemembers moved to train, and Japanese internment camps on the West Coast with barbed wire and barracks.
The Osher library embraces a broad definition of map. Willard’s “Tempe of Time” charts the concept of time from creation, and the Nuremberg Chronicle, a 1493 leather-bound tome with rag paper and more than 1,800 woodcut city views, offers finely detailed illustrations that function as maps. Louis Miller, a librarian, points out that people can touch the Chronicle without gloves to feel paper made centuries ago. He draws a line to modern tools like Google Street View: long-standing mapping conventions continue to influence how we document places.
The collection includes terrestrial and celestial globes, celestial charts, and teaching aids such as Yaggy’s Geographical Study (Chicago, 1887), a layered interactive tool once used in 19th-century classrooms. The Smith Family Globe Collection features numerous terrestrial and celestial globes. Loupes and other aids help researchers and students study fine details.
The library actively acquires maps and sometimes receives surprising finds from attics or estate cleanouts. A newly acquired Jain cosmology cloth from India, worn by a Jain as they lay dying and painted with cosmological imagery, adds material for teaching South Asian history. Edney calls it “stunning.” The library once acquired a Yaggy set after a woman cleaning out her uncle’s house found it in a breezeway rafters and contacted local institutions; the set is a gorgeous celestial map showing the heavens and planetary orbits.
Staff who care for digital and physical collections include David Neikirk, digital imaging coordinator, and Paul Fuller, coordinator of digital collections and initiatives. Exhibitions engage the public and students — for example, Geography 370: Maps, Territory, and Power students explore the gallery exhibition “Founding Memories: America at 250,” on view through June 2026.
The Osher collection also includes tactile and accessible materials such as a Braille map of Maine for the visually impaired. Its holdings span continents and cultures: celestial charts, early atlases like Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1575), and a range of cartographic ephemera and books.
Bischof emphasizes that when maps appear — from dealers, attics, or forgotten boxes — they become more than paper: insights into history and culture and a glimpse at how people have seen and imagined their world.
