In most cases, the Boston Public Library does not hold the copyright to the items in our collections. Furthermore, we do not assert any additional restrictions on copies of these items beyond those that might exist in the original. As such, we cannot grant or deny permission to use copies of these items. It is the sole responsibility of the user to make their own determination about what types of usage might be permissible under U.S. and international copyright law.
If the material you are working with is in the public domain, you do not require our permission to publish; you are free to use the images in any way that you would like, including in print. High-resolution imagery for most maps and objects in our Digital Collections is available for download directly from each object’s record page in TIFF and JPEG format.
Maps from partner institutions are not available for download or reproduction through our Digital Collections portal. Contact the holding institution for permissions and reproductions.
If you reproduce an object from our collections in your own work, please credit both the Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library for the image and, if the “Collection” field indicates a partner institution, that institution’s name as well.
Examples
Reproduction courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library
Reproduction from the Richard H. Brown Revolutionary War Collection, imagery courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library
We appreciate notification when you use our images in your own work, whether a teaching slideshow or a scholarly monograph, so that we can track usage. Please email our Reference & Cataloging Librarian to let us know if our images have been useful to you.
Should the image(s) appear in a print publication, please send one copy to the Center to be added to the collection. Visit the Contact & Connect page for mailing information.
The Leventhal Map & Education Center’s Atlascope tool makes it easy to examine how towns and cities in Massachusetts have changed over the last 150 years.
To cite a particular atlas layer that you discovered in Atlascope, click on the “Bibliographic information” button inside the “Atlases” drawer at the bottom of the screen. This will open a pane that displays bibliographic details for the layer currently in the viewport, as well as a link back to the object record in LMEC digital collections. For example, to cite this view of a 1902 Bromley atlas:
Bromley, George Washington. Atlas of the City of Boston : Boston proper and Back Bay. Boston, MA: G.W. Bromley & Co, 1902. Digitized in Atlascope, Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library. Accessed 21 November, 2023 via https://atlascope.org.
To reference the Atlascope application itself, please cite:
Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library. Atlascope. https://atlascope.org. 2023.
Please contact our Assistant Curator for Digital & Participatory Geography to let us know if you’ve found Atlascope helpful or used it as part of a physical or digital publication.