Today: 10:30am-4:00pm, by appointment only
Highlights
New maps, old maps, and spatial data with expert librarians to help you bring them to life in research and teaching.
- Teach with maps and data
- Explore history through maps
- Get help with geospatial data
- Dive into curated exhibitions
To consult with us or use maps or data in person at the Map Collection, please make an appointment.
To work with paper maps, please make a HOLLIS Special Request account before you arrive.
Explore Maps
Story Maps by the Harvard Map Collection
Use Spatial Data
Teach with Us
About Us
Our Mission
With experts in spatial analysis, map-making, and historical analysis, we want to help you make the most of the over 500,000 maps and terabytes of data at the Harvard Map Collection. Whether you are analyzing the spatial dimensions of health, making a map about demographics, or tracing changing borders on old maps, we want to find ways to support your work and collaborate on innovative research and teaching.
We collect maps and geospatial data from all time periods and all places in all languages. We are particularly interested in acquiring maps and objects that document how people have used and continue to use maps, whether it be in maps, cartographers’ drafts and journals, artists’ books, or ephemera. We seek out data that helps answer questions about the natural world and the people in it such as census data, population data, and climate information. Then we help analyze that data and bring out new geospatial insights.
Getting Here
You can access our space via a flight of stairs down from ground level at the Pusey Library main entrance or through the Lamont Library west entrance. Access without stairways is available through the Lamont Library main entrance via the ramp at the Quincy Street gate.
Accessibility of the Harvard Map Collection
- The closest accessible entrance to the Harvard Map Collection and Pusey Library is the main entrance to Lamont Library. This entrance can be accessed via Quincy Street and is accessible by automatic door and ramp. There are two elevators that go down to level B of Lamont that connects to Level 1 of Pusey Library and the Map Collection.
- Lamont Library is not open to the public. If you don’t have a Harvard ID please let us know you are coming and will be entering through Lamont so we can alert the guards.
Contact Map Collection staff member Bonnie Burns (bburns@fas.harvard.edu, 617-495-2417) with questions about accessibility of the reading room.
