Understanding the maps in the storage room at the Birmingham Public Library takes a lot more than just knowing where north is.
First, a team of librarians has to try to figure out each document's true date. Then they have to figure out what the map depicts, who drew it, and why it's important. Finally, they try to find out which other institutions have copies -- and often, there are only a handful of these rare maps around.
"When you find something and the only other one is at Harvard or Yale or the Library of Congress, you feel pretty good," said George Stewart.
Stewart, the library's former director, is helping with the Herculean task of inventorying and cataloguing the library's immense collection of historic maps -- more than 5,000 in all. So far, they've gone through about 1,100 and say they still don't know what treasures they could find.
"We're doing this catch as catch can," said Debbie Dahlin, collection management coordinator for the Birmingham Public Library. "It's kind of overwhelming. There's just so much work that needs to be done."
Library officials are applying for grants to help pay for more staff to help with the project. For now, Dahlin, Stewart, retired specials collections librarian Linda Cohen and Ben Petersen, who runs the Department of Southern History, spend about two days a week working in the map room.
Meanwhile, some maps are deteriorating unseen, and Dahlin said that even when they find a map that needs help (as an example she displays the only known copy of an 1833 map of the Creek territory in Alabama, which has pieces flaking off) there's not enough money for serious conservation.
Four benefactors
The maps were bequeathed to the library by four Alabamians with formidable private collections: investment banker Rucker Agee; industrialist Joseph H. Woodward II; Dr. Charles Ochs; and John Henley, part of the family for whom the library's archive, Linn-Henley, is named. The general focus is on Alabama or the South, but there also are world maps dating as far back as the 1500s.
Many of the maps came to the library in the 1960s and have rarely been looked at since. There are old-fashioned card catalogues for some, but until the project began, few had been scanned into a computer and many were still unknown.
In some cases, such as a 1628 map that depicts Europe as a regal woman -- Spain is the red-crowned head, Italy an outstretched arm -- the maps are works of art. Others are bedecked with images: sea monsters in unknown waters, cannibals cooking up a feast, and even, in another disturbing illustration, slaves being captured.
There are pocket-sized books that unfold into giant maps designed for 19th-century travelers. There are ancient atlases that date to 1561 and show a new way of looking at the world. There are British military maps from the American Revolution and a slew of maps that show the evolution of Alabama's counties and place names; one even marks Shades Creek as S. Hades Creek -- which could be a typo or an unknown piece of history.
And sometimes, it's just a tiny bit of text that brings real value, such as an 1837 drawing of St. Louis's harbor. Close scrutiny reveals the engineer was a young Robert E. Lee.
The dollar value of the collection is beyond estimation, said Dahlin, who called it "priceless." For some idea, consider the fact that the library has a copy of one of the most famous atlases ever, the 11-volume 1662 atlas of the world by the Dutch mapmaking family Blaeu. A similar version is priced at $750,000 on one dealer's Web site.
Knowing they're sitting on a goldmine, library officials have outfitted the map room with a security code and banks of cameras and have put most of the material off-limits until cataloguing is complete. About 900 of the maps are available online through the library's digital collectio. The ultimate goal is to allow researchers access to the maps themselves so they can uncover more about their true stories.
"I don't think people realize what we have," said Cohen. "I think it's something that we owe the community. We owe the people who gave them to the library."