PORTLAND, Maine — A smartphone gives immediate directions; a physical map offers a different lesson: scale, orientation and the sense that human understanding of place is limited and culturally shaped. That lesson is at the heart of the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education at the University of Southern Maine, where students and the public handle maps and globes ranging from modern charts to works centuries old.
Visitors find unusual perspectives: many early maps center Europe, and some predate accurate maps of the Americas. Teaching assistant Shauna Martel spins a large globe for fourth graders to show how places like Australia can feel ‘on top’ depending on how a map is drawn. Assistant director for education and outreach Renee Keul emphasizes that students raised on Google Maps learn here that maps are not strictly neutral; they reflect their creators’ viewpoints and limitations.
The library customizes classroom visits and programs for grades K–12 through university. Up to 13,000 students a year use the collection. Founding donors L.C. Smith and Eleanor Houston Smith, along with Harold and Peggy Osher, intended the materials to be accessible to young learners, and executive director Libby Bischof says the goal is to weave maps into curricula. Over the past year the library supported more than 32 disciplines, including history, environmental science, nursing, social work, astronomy, biology and sociology.
The Osher Map Library is among the nation’s largest public-facing map collections, holding roughly half a million items — maps, globes, atlases and cartographic artifacts dating back to 1475. Bischof says staff strive to move items out of vaults and into classrooms and exhibits to spark curiosity about historical objects.
Faculty scholar Matthew Edney uses the holdings in a global history course to show that mapping is a cultural practice as well as a technical one. Maps document power and contestation — from competing place names to political claims — and they also record social histories. One striking example in the collection is Louise Jefferson’s 1945 map “Uprooted People of the USA,” a vivid depiction of wartime and postwar population dislocation that marks internal migration, military movement and Japanese American internment.
The library embraces an expansive definition of map. It preserves conceptual works such as Willard’s Tempe of Time, which charts notions of time, and the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493), a leather-bound volume of rag paper illustrated with more than 1,800 woodcut city views that operate as early cartographic representations. Librarian Louis Miller notes that visitors are allowed to touch some items without gloves so they can feel paper made centuries ago, drawing a tangible line between early mapping practices and modern tools like Google Street View.
Collections include terrestrial and celestial globes, star charts, and 19th-century teaching aids such as Yaggy’s Geographical Study (Chicago, 1887), a layered, interactive classroom tool. The Smith Family Globe Collection features many terrestrial and celestial globes; researchers use loupes and other aids to study fine details.
Acquisitions arrive from dealers and surprising places: attic finds and estate cleanouts have yielded rare items. A recently acquired Jain cosmology cloth from India, used ritually at the end of life and painted with cosmological imagery, now informs teaching on South Asian history. Another notable acquisition came when a Yaggy set was discovered in a breezeway rafters and donated; the set is a striking celestial map showing planetary orbits.
Staff who manage both digital and physical collections include digital imaging coordinator David Neikirk and coordinator of digital collections and initiatives Paul Fuller. Public exhibitions and class projects introduce the wider community to the holdings; for example, students in Geography 370: Maps, Territory and Power contributed to the gallery exhibition “Founding Memories: America at 250,” on view through June 2026.
The library also prioritizes accessibility, holding tactile resources such as a Braille map of Maine for visitors who are visually impaired. Its holdings span continents and eras, from celestial charts and early atlases like Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1575) to a broad array of cartographic ephemera and books.
Bischof sums up the institution’s mission: when maps arrive from dealers, attics or forgotten boxes, they become more than paper. They are windows into how people have seen, named and imagined the world, and tools for teaching the layered histories of place and power.