Earth and Environmental Science

Libraries, archives, and other repositories with map collections.

Focused primarily on Europe and the Americas, the maps in our collection capture six centuries of human travel and exploration. Maps made by Native people in the Americas, as well as early maps made by European explorers, are part of the Newberry’s collections.

The largest and most comprehensive map collection in the world.

Hosted by Stanford University, the historical map collection has over 141,000 maps and related images online. The collection includes rare 16th through 21st century maps of North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, Antarctica, the Pacific, the Arctic, and the World. The online map collection is a searchable database that allows you to make your own journeys into spatial representations of the past. Here you can see the history of cartography through primary sources from 1500 into the 21st century.

Find geologic and historic topographic maps for the U.S. Also includes a catalog of more than 100,000 maps and stratigraphy information.

Access historical topographic maps of the United States from 1880 to 2010.

Includes maps of the U.S. National Parks System, trail maps, and the American Revolution.

Detailed and freely-available population distribution and composition maps for the whole of Central and South America, Africa and Asia.

Natural Earth is a resource for making custom maps. Data include administrative boundaries, parks and protected areas, populated places, hydrology, and bathymetry in vector format. There is also raster data for land cover, shaded relief, ocean water, and drainages with lakes.

OpenStreetMap is a map of the world, created by people like you and free to use under an open license.

The North Bay Digital Collections feature resources from SSU Library's Special Collections. Collections include photographs, unpublished manuscripts, correspondence, clippings, and ephemera.

The library's collection of maps focuses on the North Bay counties of Lake, Marin, Mendocino, Napa, Solano, and Sonoma. The maps are housed in the Regional Books Collection adjacent to the Library’s Special Collections, and include over 6,300 regional titles, most of which are library use only materials.

These right-of-way appraisal files were developed by the California Highway Commission (which became the California Transportation Commission, or CalTrans, in 1978) to document the right-of-way access needed to build Highway 101 through Sonoma County between the 1940s and 1970s. Also included are some files for Highways 12, 116, and 1.

Produced for over a century, more than 660,000 Sanborn maps chart the growth and development of more than 12,000 American towns and cities. Sanborn maps are large-scale plans of a city or town, drawn at a scale of 50 feet to an inch. They were created to assist fire insurance companies as they assessed the risk associated with insuring a particular property. The maps list street blocks and building numbers including numbers in use at the time the map was made and previous numbers.

The Sonoma County Historical Map collection, located at the History and Genealogy Library, includes a variety of maps from the late 19th through 20th century, as well as aerial survey photographs. The bulk of the collection is located in the Library's Map Drawers,