Profile: “Charting a Map Library’s Transition to the Digital Age” at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

From U. of Wisconsin News:

In 2003, Stoltenberg took over the Robinson Map Library, founded with a collection of World War II maps belonging to well-known cartographer Arthur H. Robinson, who taught on campus from 1945 until his retirement in 1980.
Coming to the UW represented a homecoming for Stoltenberg, a Wisconsin native who earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from UW-Milwaukee. There, she worked on campus at the American Geographical Society Library, home to the second-largest map collection in the western hemisphere, after the U.S. Library of Congress.
“It’s huge. It’s over a million items,” she says. “So it was really an amazing collection to get exposed to the field.”
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One of Stoltenberg’s biggest projects was collaborating with the State Cartographer’s Office and UW Digital Collections to scan 38,000 historic aerial photographs from the 1930s and 1940s, with help from a 2008 grant from the Ira and Ineva Reilly Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment. The photos were decaying from years of use and are now safely packed away in storage.

Read the Complete Article
See Also: Learn About the History of the Robinson Library

Filed under: Digital Collections, Funding, Interactive Tools, Libraries, Maps, News