Denver Presenters & Presentations

Santa’s Got a Gun : A case study of cultural stereotypes embedded in a map

In the 20th century, the General Drafting Company was one of the “Big Three” American road map makers. It prided itself on producing accurate, up-to-date maps. Yet when it came to their Christmas card maps, cultural biases overrode the company’s commitment to high standards. Starting in 1930, General Drafting produced a series of Christmas card maps that featured Santa Claus.

The 1930s pieces covered only the United States and parts of North America, while the later maps showed the entire world. Cultural and regional stereotypes are highlighted in the 1930s maps; the 1950s maps reveal not only cultural biases but also a prominent American nationalist worldview. Additionally, the 1950s maps contain geographic errors.

Although Santa Claus generally serves as an avatar for the benevolent “Traditional American” who is generous and jolly, the Santa of General Drafting maps portray him in a different light. On these maps, Santas can be seen harvesting natural resources, hunting animals, and being shown deference by non-Americans while simultaneously disparaging the Soviet Union. Most disturbingly, Santa is shooting a Native American in the back, and enslaving other Santas in Siberia. The kindly image of Santa Claus masquerades abhorrent behavior in order to make his (Americans’) actions more palatable. These Christmas card maps are compelling and unique examples that illustrate how even the objective, rational standards of cartography can be outweighed by deeply engrained cultural stereotypes and ideologies.

Insurance Maps from Insurance Company Archives – Wonderful but Challenging

Collections of fire insurance maps actually used by insurance companies are a tremendous resource for researchers but are problematic at the same time. This presentation will show some maps from Sanborn and other publishers and discuss issues about using and cataloging the collections.

Emilie Ducourneau

California State University, Northridge

“I knew her!” Processing the Mary Louise Karpinski Collection

In early January, the Map Collection at CSU, Northridge received a call from a donor about a several maps collected by a woman during her vacations. On visiting her house to pick up the maps, I discovered that they were only a small part of a larger collection of travel ephemera. Mary Karpinski traveled extensively during her life, including participating in several around the world tours in the early to mid-60s. She had retained almost everything from her travels, including itineraries, correspondences, maps, ticket stubs, and postcards. We decided to take everything relating to her travels and create the Mary Louise Karpinksi Travel Collection. I will share our processing workflows, highlights from the collection, and our hopes for future research utilizing these documents.

Self-Guided Tour as Outreach

Visitors to map libraries often don’t know where to start! A self-guided tour is a great way to make visitors feel welcome in the space without taking up too much staff time. In this lightning talk, see the breakdown of the American Geographical Society Library’s self-guided tour, its digital companion, the stops that make it up, and ways you can make your own.

Prompt Engineering and Geospatial Data Discovery: An AI Fluency Activity

In autumn 2025, The Ohio State University launched a new AI Fluency initiative, embedding AI education into the undergraduate curriculum with a goal of helping students to “understand and use AI in effective, responsible, and discipline-specific ways.” In April 2026, the Association of College & Research Libraries released a draft revision of the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education, with the emergence of generative AI being one factor considered in the review and revision process.

This presentation will discuss the development of AI-related learning objectives and prompt engineering activities in a common area of undergraduate geospatial instruction, strategies for finding geospatial data for course projects. Special attention is paid to the ways in which instructional design was informed by AI Fluency initiative learning goals, core concepts of the ACRL Framework, and the intersection between them. Through this discussion, I hope to gain peer feedback to improve future activities related to generative AI education and to provoke conversation about when, why, and how AI competencies could be integrated into library-based geospatial instruction.

How duplicative are map collections?

Academic libraries have long pursued collaborative projects with their book and serial collections, an initiative that has so far eluded map collections. This presentation reports on a project to analyze collection composition of the longest of the long tails in academic paper map collections: International topographic map sets. Sheet-by-sheet holdings were compared across several institutions including edition numbers of each sheet and printing variations. Initial results suggest the degree of collection overlap between libraries which is the first step to establishing cooperative permanent retention goals and practices.

(Un)classified: Situating a secret agent’s cataloging model within a liberal arts collection

During an inventory of hundreds of Office of Strategic Services (OSS) maps, an article by Leonard Wilson in 1948 led a librarian to crack the code of handwritten classifications on each sheet. Wilson was a chief of an OSS Map Division outpost during WWII – and a geography professor at Carleton College responsible for establishing a map collection after the war. This newly rediscovered scheme allowed us to incorporate his original classification into an ongoing cataloging project, illuminating a connection to the college’s history. Meanwhile, critical and practical questions remain about utilizing a system based on US-centered geopolitics and outdated colonial boundaries. This presentation will touch on Wilson’s time with the OSS, how that informed his methodology, and how it is shaping our emerging teaching collection.

Indoor GIS at the Library: answering the eternal question of “How do I find this book?”

As academic libraries move books and other physical materials off-site, interior library spaces become more heterogenous in layout and use. In the case of Oklahoma State University’s Edmon Low Library, we have moved half a million volumes to an auxiliary campus building. In their place we now house two dozen reservable study rooms, 3D printers, a spinning wheel, and other eclectic additions to the modern library tableau. All of these changes make patron navigation more challenging. In this presentation I will demonstrate how I used CAD floorplans to create a navigable, interactive map of all six floors of the library, including shelving, printers, computer workstations, and other amenities. I will finish with a brief discussion of how I am working alongside OSU Facilities Management to integrate indoor GIS across other vital campus spaces.

Taming the Chaos: Devising and Conducting an Inventory of the On-Site Maps at the UCLA Library

After starting at the UCLA Library and assuming responsibility for the map collection in July 2023, I learned that the majority of our on-site maps were not cataloged due to historical practices and were disorganized. To develop a better understanding of our holdings and to begin the arduous work of cleaning up the collection, I devised an inventory process, drawing on my background in archival work, to get a handle on the situation. The main objectives were to develop a clear understanding of the collection’s contents, identify gaps, and improve accessibility for researchers. This process took multiple years and the assistance of four student workers, wrapping up in the fall of 2025. I will discuss the process, challenges, and findings of this process that spanned two UCLA Library locations and over 100,000 maps.

Nathan B. Piekielek

Penn State University

Bruce Godfrey

University of Idaho

Time for an update – an archival aerial photography inventory and needs assessment survey

This presentation will discuss a national inventory and needs assessment survey on archival aerial photography held in academic libraries. This project is funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and organized in collaboration by the University of Idaho and The Pennsylvania State University. The results of this project will be posted online for reference by the academic library community as well as other users and service providers and will inform subsequent grant proposal. The specific audience for this work includes academic geospatial librarians and archive managers with archival aerial photography collections; however, the anticipated impact of the project is expected to extend to a broad cross-section of researchers and the public who are interested in visual aerial histories of America’s storied landscapes.

Don’t Chunk that Map Facsimile!

When considering maps to keep or deaccession from a collection, facsimiles can be an easy first sweep as items to remove. Many of us have facsimiles in our collections that pre-date map collections being easily accessible online or “fancy” facsimiles produced for sale by publishing companies or national libraries. But before you toss out a facsimile, make sure it isn’t something special in its own right. This presentation uses three facsimiles from the William L. Clements Library map collection to illustrate why spending a few minutes to research these reproduced maps is worthwhile.

A Win-Win: Student Library Employee-led Projects

For over a decade the UC Berkeley Earth Sciences & Map Library has hired a mix of graduate and undergraduate student employees to assist with GIS & mapping projects. The vision for these positions has always included letting students follow their interests and develop skills on projects that also benefit the Library in some way, for example by writing python code to help with batch processing.

Over the past two years we’ve experimented with giving our student library employees–including those not hired specifically to support GIS & maps–more agency to develop their own stand-alone projects. These initiatives allow anyone on our student team to add skills and projects to their resume, develop technical and career readiness skills, and ultimately allow us to form a deeper connection between our student team and the library. While many projects continue to align with GIS & map work that we do, the success of these stand-alone projects has equally inspired new student-led initiatives including peer-mentoring, outreach, website development, and more.

In this presentation we’ll highlight a few of the projects that our student library employees have developed, including a virtual tour of our library, physical and digital library exhibits, visualizations of map checkout data, and an Air Photo Locator tool. We’ll also reflect on what has worked well and what adjustments we have made to ensure that it truly results in a win-win situation for both the library and the students.

Each of these projects is publicly accessible on the library’s website: https://guides.lib.berkeley.edu/earthexhibits https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/d78d707f5b344b4ba52f3127a441e2b6

The BTAA BIG map collection: Working Group Update

In February 2026, the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) Geospatial Information Network (GIN) formed a Working Group charged with exploring a “BIG Collection” that would increase integration of member map collections, both paper and digital. We began with an environmental scan of 19 map collections at 17 institutions. We are now developing a demonstration project in which we merge holdings information of a narrowly defined collection area, with eventual goals including map-based search and discovery. This presentation will share the progress made and perceived hurdles to developing a fully integrated “BIG” map collection.

Wikidata as Gazetteer: One Editor’s Experiences of Geographic Information as Linked Data

Wikidata contains geographic information about hundreds of thousands of places, including coordinates, administrative hierarchies, census data, historical names, and links to external authorities. This content allows Wikidata to function as a gazetteer, despite it not having been designed as one. Drawing on nearly ten years as a Wikidata editor, including recent work coordinating my contributions across Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, and OpenStreetMap, I will examine Wikidata’s affordances as a place authority: its relational richness, its inclusivity, and its gaps, grounded in examples from my own editing practice. I will close with brief observations on Wikibase as a potential platform for gazetteers and authority files.

Design and Lead Engaging Map Collection Tours

Library tours should be interesting and enjoyable for you and your tour group. In this hands-on session we will cover how to plan an interpretive thematic tour of your map collection and tips on improving your and your visitors’ library tour experience. Whether you are new to your leading tours in map library or a collection space with maps or have a lot of experience, we welcome your participation in this session!