James Ford Bell Library map portal

About the collection

Maps are alluring. They draw us into worlds sometimes familiar, sometimes unknown, but always fascinating. Maps can be understood and analyzed as visual objects, as texts to be read, and as physical artifacts of a particular culture--or all of these things at once.  Historical maps are rarely about getting from Point A to Point B.  They can detail world view, contradictory geographical perspectives, and a variety of cultural information through the combination of both text and image. 

The James Ford Bell Library has an extensive collection of maps:  manuscripts and print, bound and flat.  Additionally, we have two 17th-century globes by Vincenzo Coronelli on permanent display in the Ford W. and Amy Bell Room in Andersen Library.  

Thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, we digitized more than 22,460  maps found bound within our rare books and atlases. About 10,000 of these maps, as well as some of our flat maps can be accessed online: Bell Library's UMedia Historical Maps collection, to which maps are added throughout the year.  

The 1602 Ricci map, Kunyu wanguo quantu 坤輿萬國全圖 (Complete Geographical Map of Ten Thousand Countries), is on permanent exhibition in the James Ford Bell Library Gallery in Andersen Library.

All of our flat maps, as well as all of the books and atlases in which maps can be found, can be accessed through the UMN Libraries online catalog.  You may narrow your search to Bell Library materials by selecting "Catalog Only" and "James Ford Bell Library under "Search Scope".