The center was founded in 2004 with a $10 million endowment as a public-private partnership between the Boston Public Library (BPL) and map collector and philanthropist Norman B.

Its holdings stretch chronologically from the 15th century to the present, and geographically cover the world, with a focus on Boston and New England.

The center also holds depository library maps and atlases produced by federal, state, and local agencies, as well as data sets used in geographic information systems.

[3] In 2013, the center received a $40,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to promote digital access to 3,000 cartographic images held by multiple institutions that document the period of the American Revolutionary War (1750-1800).

[4] Digital collections appear in an online repository built on the Blacklight search interface, a custom discovery tool called Atlascope, and on the Internet Archive.