Mapping the Change: Cataloguing Educational Wall Maps
UoM ICP student placement, 2024
In 2019, pre-pandemic, Carly Richardson spent a large part of the summer checking and cleaning a selection of rolled maps transferred from the geography department, so that they could begin to be catalogued the following academic year. Nearly five years later, they have re-emerged for that very project.
Taking on a project that has had some attention in the past was of interest to both of us. The opportunity to work with maps had an instant appeal and cataloguing methods had piqued our curiosity too.
After a thorough session with Laura Caradonna from Collection Care, who brought us up to date with best practice for the handling of the maps, materials for wrapping and tying them, and how they would be re-stored, we felt well-armed to begin this project. Particularly with the maps from the history department, which have not yet had a proper conservation eye on them, it is unclear what will unfold (or unroll) in front of you, and how delicate it will be.
When cataloguing a map, there can be a huge number of details to examine, some harder to locate than others. Authors, editors, publishers, cartographers, printers and named societies all need to be logged correctly in relevant MARC fields in an Excel sheet, along with border sizes, years of production, ownership provenance, and even, after all that, what the map shows. After a while, patterns begin to emerge, and things slowly start to make sense, but questions still arise, particularly when faced with a detailed map of Russia written entirely in Cyrillic. Once we have collected this information, though, it will be given a professional check by one of the team and fed into ALMA, the library management system, emerging on the other side in full view of an eager public on the University’s Special Collections search.
Maps go out of date for obvious reasons. Borders change, towns grow, lakes dry up, or someone puts up a massive statue on a hill. Some, however, fall out of fashion when the cultural mood shifts. What was once perceived as acceptable to use as a teaching aid becomes less favourable and is thrown into storage when updated. However, in genuine support of contemporary dialogue focused on decolonizing heritage, and revisiting the past rather than burying it, maps from the early to mid-twentieth century and how they were used as teaching aids are increasingly seen as valuable, visual documents of the late days of empires and escalating societal changes.
Hopefully in making them available for study, they will be able to contribute to today’s conversations.
Pete Moody and Lise Hopwood
MA Library and Archive Studies
