News and Events

The American Geographical Society Library recently acquired two 18th-century maps and restored two 18th-century atlases thanks to a gift from the John Quincy Adams Foundation of the Order of Founders and Patriots of America.   The French-language 1776 map from German cartographer Matthäus Albrecht Lotter depicts the British Colonies and portions of the Great Lakes Region at the outbreak of the American Revolution. Additionally, …

The American Geographical Society Library recently acquired the Karen Wynn Fonstad Collection, including the original manuscript maps of The Atlas of Middle-Earth. A cartographer from Oshkosh, Fonstad was a lifelong fan of J.R.R. Tolkien’s work. Upon her passing in 2005, Fonstad left her family an archive of nearly 1,000 map drafts, many of them based on Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and The Silmarillion.  Fonstad’s meticulous readings of …

Beginning May 25, the UWM Libraries will merge Archives and Special Collections into a single department: Archives and Special Collections.   The UWM Libraries are continuously evolving and always evaluating how to operate and fulfill the Libraries’s mission with the given resources. The merger of Archives and Special Collections will better align the Libraries’s workforce while maintaining high quality services for users.  The Archives and Special Collections department will be located …

Thanks to the work of Digital Collections & Initiatives, the American Geographical Society Library has recently made available a digitized 1478 copy of Ptolemy’s Geography. The AGSL holds over 30 volumes from copies of Ptolemy’s Geography, with this digitization marking the tenth volume digitized, and digital access to the oldest volume in the collection.   Known as the …