David Rumsey amid items of his map, atlas and globe collection

The David Rumsey Map Collection was started over 30 years ago and contains more than 150,000 maps. The collection focuses on rare 16th through 21st century maps of North and South America, as well as maps of the World, Asia, Africa, Europe, and Oceania. The collection includes atlases, wall maps, globes, school geographies, pocket maps, books of exploration, maritime charts, and a variety of cartographic materials including pocket, wall, children's, and manuscript maps. Items range in date from about 1550 to the present.

Digitization of the collection began in 1996 and there are now over 100,000 items online, with new additions added regularly. The site is free and open to the public. Here viewers have access not only to high resolution images of maps that are extensively cataloged, but also to a variety of tools that allow to users to compare, analyze, and view items in new and experimental ways.

Maps are uniquely suited to high-resolution scanning because of the large amount of detailed information they contain. In their original form, maps and atlases can be large, delicate, and unwieldy. Digitization increases their accessibility, and when combined with online catalogs, they can be searched in a variety of ways. The site allows public access to rare maps that have been hidden or available only to a few.

With Luna Imaging's LUNA software, the maps are experienced in a revolutionary way. Multiple maps from different time periods can be viewed side-by-side. Viewers can also create their own collections of maps that hold particular interest by saving groups of images. Complete cataloging data accompany each image, enabling in-depth searches of the collection.

Materials created in America and that illustrate the evolution of the country's history, culture, and population distinguish the collection. Close inspection of the maps often reveals the growth and decline of towns, mining excavations, the unfolding of the railroads, and the "discovery" of the American West by European explorers. The collection also includes European imprints containing maps of the Americas that were influential to American cartographers, as well as maps of other parts of the world distinguished by great craftsmanship, significance, and beauty.

A more detailed description of the evolution of the physical collection into the online collection can be found in "State of the Art", an article that originally appeared in Mercator's World Magazine.

David Rumsey has donated his entire physical map colltection to Stanford University where it is housed at the David Rumsey Map Center in the Stanford Library. The Rumsey Map Center is open to the public weekdays from 1-5pm and weekday mornings by appointment. Stanford also archives all of Rumsey's digital map collection in the Stanford Digital Repository. Rumsey continues to make his collection available online at www.davidrumsey.com

about the technology

The collection on the Internet brings together the finest optical equipment and digital scanners, cutting edge viewing technology, the latest image processing software, powerful wavelet compression, and reliable long-term storage of digital images. The digitized maps are very high resolution images scanned at 300 to 800 pixels per inch, as measured against the original map's dimensions. The larger maps generate files frequently approaching 5 gigabytes in size; the average file size of images in the collection is 250 megabytes.

The following hardware and software is used in the process of creating and distributing the images over the Internet:

LUNA client/server and browser software by Luna Imaging, Inc.

PhaseOne PowerphaseFX 4x5 digital scanning camera back (380 megabyte capture)

PhaseOne image-capture software

Sinar X 4x5 view camera

Rodenstock lenses

Kaiser RePro copy stand with Videssence Icelites

Adobe PhotoShop CS6

MrSid image compression software by LizardTech

Georeferencer v4 software and hosting by Klokan Technologies

Maplicity and MapImager GIS software from Telemorphic (archived website)

ArcGIS software from ESRI

Global Mapper GIS mapping software

Computer Network:

Apple Mac Pro, Two 3.5GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon E5, 64 gigabytes RAM

Apple Mac Pro, Two 2.26GHz Quad-Core, 12 gigabytes RAM

Dell Precision T7820 Workstation, Six Cores, 128 gigabytes RAM, one Samsung 8ft 8k screen

about cartography associates

Cartography Associates, founded in 1996, promotes the distribution of digital facsimiles both in print and electronic media. Specializing in both primary source documents and cutting-edge technology, Cartography Associates is committed to developing tools that integrate cataloging with visual images on the Internet. Cartography Associates' vision is to offer users the best of both worlds: the powerful searching, access, and user functionality made possible by technology, combined with the visual beauty, technical mastery and intellectual richness of original source materials.

Copyright and Permissions

Images from this web site and database may be reproduced or transmitted, but not for commercial use. Permitted non-commercial use is any work or publication, either in print or digital media. Please give image credit to "David Rumsey Map Collection, David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford Libraries" Commercial use is selling reproductions of our images. For commercial use or commercial republication, contact mailto:carto@davidrumsey.com

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. By downloading any images from this site, you agree to the terms of that license. Users are expected to abide by all copyright laws. Distribution, reproduction, or other use requires the written permission of any copyright and other rights holders unless the materials are in the public domain or authorized by fair use or other statutory exemption. It is the user’s obligation to determine and satisfy copyright or other use restrictions when publishing or otherwise distributing materials found in this collection. For maps not in the public domain that we know are being sold by their makers, we do not allow downloading or printing and we attempt to provide a link to the maker's site in our metadata for the map.