Lost 17th century atlases found in Oxford college

The Times Higher Education website has reported that an historic collection assistant at Queen’s College, Oxford, has discovered two rare atlases which have lain unknown among it’s manuscript collection for over 200 years. The first: “Description of the maritime ports of the Kingdom of Portugal” dates from 1648. The other, “Plans of the cities and fortresses of the conquest of Oriental India” dates from the same period. Very few copies exist of either atlas.

“Many Oxbridge college libraries have major, sometimes world-class historic collections – Queen’s alone has about 100,000 volumes published before 1850. Such vast quantities of material are overseen by small teams of librarians who have many other demands on their time and inevitable gaps in their knowledge. They seldom convince their colleges that their needs are a priority. As a result, extraordinary artefacts sometimes languish unnoticed, with no one able to appreciate their true significance or value.”

Full Story:

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=407828&c=1

Lovell Johns have worked on a number of projects to capture historcal mapping for use in GIS, and have close links with the Bodleian Library.