In 1808, Harvard acquired 10,000 maps of America from a German collector who gathered the maps while compiling a history of America.

Those maps formed the initial Harvard Map Collection, the nation's oldest.

From an Erwin Raisz hand-drawn Christmas card.

From those beginnings, the Collection today has some 400,000 maps and 15,000 books, of which 10,000 are atlases.

The Collection's maps date back to 1511 and cover everything from Colonial America to modern population density and incidence of crime. They've come from hundreds, if not thousands, of sources over the years and together make up a valuable resource for Harvard faculty and students.

"I've used it every year since I started teaching in the fall of 1965," said John Womack Jr., the Robert Woods Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics. "It's a terrific resource. I wouldn't be surprised to find anything in there."

For the next few months, the Collection is showing off some of its holdings in an exhibit of the work of Harvard mapmaker Erwin Raisz.

Raisz, who specialized in landform maps, which depict the earth's physical features, was one of the last pen-and-ink map makers, according to Head of the Map Collection David Cobb. Raisz was so careful in drawing mountains, streams, and other land features that today his maps are collected as art.

"He developed the landform map to such an extent of detail above his contemporaries that it became an art form," Cobb said.

The exhibit is just outside the Map Collection in Pusey Library. It opened this month and runs through July 1.

The exhibit, jointly sponsored by the Boston Map Society, presents a variety of Raisz's maps, along with some diaries, sketch books, and personal items like Christmas cards, which Raisz and his wife made up and illustrated to inform family and friends about the past year. Raisz taught cartography from 1931 to 1950 at the now-closed Harvard Institute for Geographical Exploration. He also curated the Institute's map collection.

Though the Harvard Map Collection has a wide assortment of maps from all over the world, its collection of early American and European maps is particularly extensive. Though many maps have been donated to the Collection, Harvard has actively sought out and purchased maps since the late 1800s, Cobb said.

Martin von Wyss is a digital cartography specialist at the Harvard Map Collection.

Although collecting efforts continue all over the world, there is an emphasis on gathering the maps of the former Soviet Union, where many once-secret maps are now available.

In fact, maps of some security-conscious countries, like Turkey and South Korea, are more readily available from former Soviet sources than from the countries themselves.

"We are buying maps of Turkey and Cuba that are in Russian because we can't get them from the original country," Cobb said. "We can't get maps from South Korea but we can get Russian maps of South Korea."

In recent years, faculty and students using the Collection can get maps from another unique source: themselves.

With computerization and the increasing availability of federal, state, and local data, Collection staff can help students and faculty create their own maps, showing whatever data is pertinent to their subject of study.

"We feel at times the data rains on us," Cobb said. "We used to have to wait for Rand McNally or the U.S. government to produce a map. Now we have that data and we can produce a map any way a student or faculty member wants it."

Another thrust has been to expand the Collection's presence on the World Wide Web, Cobb said. The Collection's Web page contains a few maps, including the Massachusetts Electronic Atlas, which uses GIS, a geographic information system to help users create their own maps of Massachusetts based on factors such as crime, median income, and other statistics of their choosing.

Prue Adler, assistant executive director of the Association of Research Libraries in Washington, D.C., said GIS projects such as the Massachusetts Electronic Atlas provide access to data in a visual way not available until recently.

"[GIS] gives the ability to manipulate information visually in a way very, very differently from what we had before," Adler said. "Harvard has done quite an extraordinary job, not just in making it accessible to the University community, but to the broader community through its Website," Adler said.

Harvard Map Collection Director David Cobb describes two panoramas by Erwin Raisz, Harvard's most prominent mapmaker.

The Web presence and increasing availability of government information has expanded the pool of people who use the Collection, Cobb said. From the traditional users in the humanities have been added everyone from botanists to researchers from the School of Public Health. In the early '90s, perhaps a half-dozen people would come into the Collection in a typical day. Today the number is closer to 50, Cobb said.

"We've seen a tremendous increase [in usage]," Cobb said. "Digital information has brought people here who never were aware there was a Map Collection."

Managing the flood of data brought on by the Information Age is one of the Collection's biggest challenges, Cobb said. Collection managers need to ensure that the historic paper collection is not forgotten in the flood of new data.

"We don't want to over-emphasize one or the other," Cobb said. "If we stayed just with the paper collection, we would have become a paper museum. But we don't want to become a computer lab, either."

The Collection's strength, from Cobb's point of view, is the fact that it does have extensive collections of both old maps and current records. One can see students in the library, he said, working at a computer, with sheets of data spread before them and an old map or atlas on the floor near their chair.

"People can look at old maps of the 15th and 16th centuries and follow changes in boundaries, transportation systems, and other things up to the present day," Cobb said.

Map Maker Erwin Raisz

What: Exhibit of the work of Harvard mapmaker Erwin Raisz

When: Through July 1

Times: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Where: Harvard Map Collection, Pusey Library

Sponsors: Harvard Map Collection and the Boston Map Society