The most eminent scholar to visit the Boswell Collection was Helen Wallis, best known as head of maps for the British Library. Cal State Fullerton students and faculty in history, geography and anthropology have pursued research in the collection, and so have scholars from around the country.
Vogeler says that maps should be understood and studied as historical documents. "Like books, maps embody, synoptically, many components of a past cultural world: geographic knowledge, scientific understanding, anthropological beliefs, artistic styles, printing methods, publishing conventions and commercial standards," he explains. "Every map to some degree encapsulates a history of past maps leading up to itself, and each has its own history from publication through successive editions. Each incorporates cumulative truths and cumulative errors, as well, perhaps, as discoveries and novelties."
A new era for the Boswell Collection began late in 2004. The Boswell Project is designed to bring the collection into the digital world — a process that will take four years of painstaking work. The project team is headed jointly by Vogeler and Farron Brougher, a free-lance writer, photography specialist and member of the Patrons Board of Governors, and includes Annette Anderson-Ma and Jane Olson, both library staff members. Dorothy Heide, president of the Patrons, is an active advocate of the project, and Bill Warren of the California Map Society provides expertise from his work in digitizing maps at the Huntington Library.
Equipped with an 8-megapixel Canon digital camera and two dedicated Dell computers running advanced programs, the team conducts imaging and cataloging procedures in tandem. Multiple photos of a map are digitally enhanced and then the map is computer cataloged according to 25 descriptive categories, or data fields, such as date of publication, cartographer, title, and region depicted. This information integrated with the images in a single computer file uniquely identifies each map.
