Microforms Give Way to Map Collection @ the Boston Public Library

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Link to January 3 Boston Globe article, "BPL charts modern course".

Excerpt: For now, the Microtext Department room at the Boston Public Library retains its quaint, last-century ambience. Located on the first floor of the McKim Building, fronting Copley Square, the narrowly rectangular space features a 74-foot-long arched ceiling overlooking a row of microfilm machines and work stations.

In a few weeks, however, the machines will be gone, a nearby reference desk removed, and the room on track for a $1.8 million makeover. Next fall, if all goes as planned, the space will reopen as the new repository and exhibit hall for the library’s Norman B. Leventhal Map Collection, one of the country’s foremost cartographic resources. Many of the collection’s most valuable maps, atlases, and other materials will come out of storage and into fuller public view.

For the first time, library officials say, visitors will have ready access to an asset most Bostonians know little about. Meanwhile, the Leventhal collection will bolster its mission to serve as an educational resource for teachers and students as well as historians, scholars, and collectors.