During Science Hall’s renovation, much of the Robinson Map Library’s collection will be in storage, but its aerial photos will be available — including this image showing a popular local peninsula. Robinson Map Library
If you want to see all of Wisconsin — its towns, lakes, fields, and hills — then you can either jump in the car and spend a few weeks driving backroads, or you can jump online and spend a few minutes with the Arthur H. Robinson Map Library’s aerial photo collection.
The Robinson Map Library is UW–Madison’s cartography collection. It holds about 300,000 maps, as well as globes, atlases, and gazetteers. And it has the largest collection of aerial photos shot in Wisconsin: 260,000 prints and more than 100,000 high-resolution digitized photos, dating back to the 1930s.
The library is named for Arthur Robinson MA’38, a legendary cartographer and UW geography professor. For many years, its home has been in Science Hall, but while that building is undergoing an extensive renovation, the library has moved to the Computer Sciences building on West Dayton.
That exile is expected to last about three years, so most of the library’s maps — about 195 cabinets full of them — have gone into long-term storage.
But the aerial photos take up less space, and they’re unique, according to librarian Jaime Martindale.
“No one else has them,” she says. “They’re a Wisconsin collection and they’re very popular.”
While at Computer Sciences, the Robinson Library’s staff can continue digitizing photos to make them available to the public. To view them, patrons can visit maps.sco.wisc.edu and look at the library’s Wisconsin Historic Aerial Image Finder app.
Published in the Fall 2026 issue
Comments
No comments posted yet.