Empowering Maptivists: K–12 Education at the Leventhal Map & Education Center

The Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center (LMEC) was created in 2004 as a nonprofit organization in public-private partnership between philanthropist Norman Leventhal and the Boston Public Library. With over 200,000 maps and 5,000 historical atlases, the center was founded to educate through exhibitions, educational programming, and robust digital collections. An essential part of LMEC’s mission is to “inspire curiosity and learning and foster geographic perspectives on the relationships between people and places” (LMEC 2020a). LMEC is one of only a few map collections that offers extensive K–12 programming and the only one that does so in a public library in the United States. LMEC uses its physical and digital collections to illuminate historical content and themes as well as current issues through a geographic lens. In more recent years, it has expanded educational training and access for the public and K–12 students to geographic information system (GIS) data and map making in order to empower individuals to better understand where they live and the issues that affect them.