Printing your maps + Donations
*** Edited 31/08/2018 to reflect the fact that I'm looking to reinvigorate this project - should interest from the guild be high enough ***
Dear all,
I'm a librarian at Cambridge University Library working in the Map Room and I've recently been trying to extend our collection of fantasy maps (or maps of Imaginary Places as we classify them). I've been a long time fantasy/sci-fi fan myself and since getting my job here I've taken it on myself to ensure that we have a good collection of such works, so we can keep and conserve them for future generations.
The Map Room itself holds about 2 million paper maps (we don't really do digital - well, we do but on a much more limited scale). Included in the collection are many of the generic fantasy maps you can think of (Lord of the Rings, Narnia, Discworld and so on) but I've been trying to extend this out more widely and as a result we now have many maps from novels, role playing games, video games, TV shows. Obviously, as this kind of material has not been sort after by the department for some time, the collection is in no way complete - in fact its still quite small (probably about 100-150 items) so there is a lot of room for improvement.
Anyway, on to my main point. I've recently started a project which aims to reproduce maps from the the Cartographers Guild in a physical format, with the intention to store, catalogue and preserve them within our collection.
I've already begun building this collection thanks to many kind responses from people reading this post and would of course like to gain more items where possible. If you interested these are the ways to add your work to our collection:
1) Firstly if your feeling very generous and we would love to accept paper copies of your work (provided they are both of readable size). For postage details please contact me via PM.
2) You can send me high res digital files which I can then take to a printer in order to reproduce them. I will probably want to print items at A2 size, but may also reproduce them at A3 or A1 depending upon the size necessary to make the information readable. Again if this interests you please send me a PM.
Reguarless of the option you choose I will also need a certain number of details to catalogue an item to a basic level...
Title of work
Authors name
Year of publication (or creation in this case)
Setting *
*: I'm thinking it may be useful to know if a map is from a series of unified works, so if the map pertains to a specific world/setting I think that would be (Middle Earth, for example).
While I would love to take a copy of everything people here have produced I will probably have to assert some form of quality control, which I hope you can all understand. I will also be focusing on maps of worlds, continents, islands, cities or towns (probably in that order). Maps of smaller areas like dungeons, castles or other such things would be much lower priority, though I may make exception if the quality or style of the work was very high or unique. I will probably also focus upon maps of places outside existing intellectual properties (like the lord of the rings) as we likely already have maps of those places that have been produced and published for the market.
I should also reiterate that the purpose of this entire thing is not to take any forms of rights from you. Its simply an effort to store examples of such works in a physical archive.
I will probably start sending people PMs asking if they are happy to contribute their work, requesting high res images that I can print from. If your interested in the idea please feel free to contact me.
If you want to see a response from my manager to another guild member confirming my identity you can view that here:
http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...l=1#post272878
and if you would like to see some photos (sorry for my bad camera work) of the first batch of maps donated by members of the Cartographers Guild within the Map Room please go here:
http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...l=1#post273144
Also if you would like to learn more about the Map Room please follow this link:
http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/departments/maps
Best wishes,
Ian
*Edited 22/06/2015 - reworded to reflect the creation of the project, which was not the original purpose of the post.*
*Edited 31/08/2018 - updated to reflect the possible reinvigoration of the project.**
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