Map collection

Sometimes, map collections are combined with graphic sheets, manuscripts and rare prints in a single department.

According to scholars of the renaissance, maps were collected from the 15th century, either at the court or at naval academies to prepare for voyages of discovery.

Over time, new techniques, such as copper engraving, reduced production costs, and assisted in spreading maps more widely.

Thus, the title, author(s), imprint and ISBN of any recently published map are mentioned in official records.

Archive staff, often not trained in cartographic matters, can be cautious in describing an unwieldy, and in some ways reputedly "foreign" document type.

The Royal Library of Belgium in Brussels has a collection of over 200,000 maps, atlases, cartographic books and globes.

The Département des cartes et plans of the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris ranks among the top three worldwide collections of cartographic materials.

Not currently publicly available is the collection of the publisher Justus Perthes in Gotha, which is owned by the state of Thuringia and presently housed at the University of Erfurt.

[7] As with books in libraries, map collections now put more weight on creation of digital documents.

Such new forms of publication present map collections with major problems, as not just "mere" text and some inline images need to be kept, but very large amounts of data, up to several Gigabytes, that may eventually be required to operate specialised geographic information systems.

The digitization of analogue map stocks also offers the opportunity to link library catalogues directly with the images (or at least with so-called thumbnails).