Thanks to our new initiative, Portal to the Past: Creating Brooklyn Historical Society’s Digital Map Collections, BHS has just finished digitizing 1,600 maps!
In 2017, BHS received a generous grant from National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to support Portal to the Past: Creating Brooklyn Historical Society’s Digital Map Collections, a project that will increase public access to the institution’s extensive collection of flat and folded maps through conservation, digitization, and the creation of a web-based portal. Additional generous funding for this project has been provided by the Robert D. L. Gardiner Foundation as part of the Revealing Long Island History project.
BHS’s map collection is full of unique and special maps that are now preserved forever as high-resolution images. These will soon be available to students, researchers, and the world via our upcoming Map Portal, launching this fall! While we are still putting final touches on the map portal, you are welcome to come visit the Othmer Library and look at the maps in person, as all our maps are back onsite and available upon request.
here and here. In the meantime, please stay tuned for the next update on this project!
Map Portal Team:
Julie I. May, Laura Juliano, Camille Lannan, Daniel Brenner
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![><figcaption>Bay Ridge and Red Hook Channels, Buttermilk Channel, Gownus Canal and Gowanus Creek Channel, New York, showing condition of improvements in charge of Major H.M. Adams, Corps of Engineers, U.S.A. [1896]; B A-1896.Fl; Brooklyn Historical Society.</figcaption></figure><br><br>While the majority of the maps in the collection depict Brooklyn, BHS also has a large collection of Long Island, Manhattan, New York State maps, as well as topical maps such as those depicting Civil War and Revolutionary War battles and events. Together, these maps provide unprecedented detail about the built environment of Brooklyn and the United States across five centuries.<br><br><figure><img src=](https://static.bklynlibrary.org/prod/public/images/blog-bkology/cbh/1-2.jpg)
here and here. In the meantime, please stay tuned for the next update on this project!