Then — here's where the project pays off — maps can be retrieved by using combinations of the data categories to find, for example, all the collection's maps of Boston during the Revolutionary era, changing images of the Japanese archipelago or the Black Sea, South America as interpreted by different cartographers, California portrayed as an island – an indefinite variety of fascinating subjects. Thus a library search tool becomes a research tool for historical cartography. The riches of the Boswell Collection, summoned up with the click of a mouse, can be instantly organized in different ways to meet different interests.
That's the aim of the Boswell Project. Knowledge of, and selective control over, the contents of the collection will be available to all users of the Pollak Library. And the project in its later stages hopes to go much further, providing online access to the collection from home computers via the library's website. The original maps may or may not need to be studied in Special Collections, depending upon the user's purposes: this now becomes an option.
"But early maps should really be closely scrutinized if at all possible," Vogeler
says. "We may never know just what was going on in the mind of the
cartographer, but we can clearly discern the ingenuity of early map-makers,
their high art and meticulous craft, the idiosyncratic charm of their work.
Not least among the aims of the Boswell Project is to encourage appreciation
of early maps as embodiments of human skill and striving." 
