David Rumsey Map Center

Most visitors to Stanford never climb past the ground floor of Green Library. Those who do find one of the best free rooms on campus. The David Rumsey Map Center fills the fourth floor of the library's historic Bing Wing with antique maps, atlases and globes, plus two wall-sized screens that let you zoom into a sixteenth century world map until you can read the place names along a single river.

The center opened in April 2016 to house a gift from the collector David Rumsey. It is a working research space for Stanford classes, but it keeps regular drop-in hours for anyone who registers at the door. This page covers how to get in, what to see in fall 2026 and how to use the huge online collection that came before the physical room. Our Green Library guide explains the rest of the building.

Who David Rumsey is

David Rumsey made his money in San Francisco real estate. He started collecting maps in 1980, at first focusing on eighteenth and nineteenth century maps of North and South America. Over the following decades the collection grew to cover the whole world, from the 1500s to the present.

Two decisions made the collection famous. The first came in 1997, when Rumsey began scanning his maps at high resolution. He launched a public website to show them in 1999, long before most libraries put their map holdings online. The second came in February 2009, when he announced that he would give the entire physical collection to Stanford. Stanford News described that gift as more than 150,000 rare maps and related items, including atlases, wall maps, globes, school geographies, pocket maps and manuscript maps.

The gift joined maps Stanford already owned, such as the Glen McLaughlin Collection, known for maps that show California as an island, plus holdings from Special Collections and the Branner Earth Sciences Library. The combined collection needed a home where people could actually use it. That home became the map center.

What the room looks like

Stanford built the center as a single large reading and teaching room with maps everywhere you look. Framed sheets line the walls, globes sit on stands and atlases fill the bookcases. Even the doors carry maps.

The showpieces are the two video walls. According to Stanford News at the opening, one measures about 16 by 9 feet and the other about 12 by 7 feet. One of them responds to touch. Staff use them to project a scanned map at a size no paper original could survive being handled at. A visitor can stand at the screen and pan across a city plan street by street, then turn to the table to see the paper original beside it.

Tables and chairs lock together and can be rearranged for classes, seminars and talks. On a quiet afternoon you may find a professor running a session on colonial surveying in one corner while a visitor leafs through a road atlas in another.

Hours and how to get in

The map center is free, but you have to get through the Green Library turnstiles first. Stanford's visiting page lays out the steps.

1. Enter through the Bing Wing. Stanford recommends the Bing Wing entrance, the one closest to the Main Quad.
2. Register as a visitor. Without a Stanford ID, you register at the entrance with a government-issued photo ID and have your photo taken at the registration kiosk. Our Green Library page explains the day pass limits.
3. Go up to the fourth floor. For step-free access, ask the entrance desk for an elevator card, turn right after the turnstile and ride up. On foot, take the stairs past the turnstile to the second-floor Munger Rotunda, go through the door marked David Rumsey Map Center and climb two more flights.

Drop-in hours change from week to week. In October 2026 Stanford said the center is typically open on Wednesdays from 1 to 5 p.m., Thursdays from 1 to 5 p.m. and Fridays from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Always confirm on the library hours page before making a special trip, especially during finals and the winter closure.

Friday tours

The easiest way to understand the collection is to join a guided tour. Stanford lists tours regularly on Fridays. You register through the Stanford events page and the cutoff is 4 p.m. Pacific on the Thursday before. Space is limited because the room doubles as a classroom, so sign up early in the week.

Groups and Stanford classes follow a separate process. Faculty can request class visits. Staff will then pull maps that match a course topic. Independent researchers are welcome to use the collections on site and should contact the center first so the right items are ready.

Exhibits in 2026

The center marks its tenth year in 2026. Its fall show, Emergent Properties: Decennial Reflections on Collections, runs from September 9, 2026 to March 5, 2027. It brings together 40 objects that drove the most scholarship and teaching at the center over its first decade. Expect a mix of atlases, wall maps and less obvious items, each chosen because classes and researchers kept returning to it.

Stanford's events calendar listed viewing on the same Wednesday, Thursday and Friday schedule as the drop-in hours. An exhibition reception with a tour by David Rumsey himself was announced for Friday, November 20, 2026 at 3 p.m. Details can change, so check the listing before you go.

Exhibits here are small compared with a museum. Plan on 30 to 45 minutes, longer if you get pulled into a screen session. If you want more on view the same day, the Bing Wing downstairs runs its own exhibitions, described on our Green Library page.

The online collection

You do not need to come to Stanford to use David Rumsey's maps. The David Rumsey Map Collection website is free and open to everyone. Wikipedia's summary of the collection put the number of digitized items above 150,000 as of August 2026. The physical collection at Stanford is larger still.

A few features make the site worth bookmarking:

• Deep zoom. The scans are large enough to read tiny engraved lettering. The viewer runs in a normal browser with no plug-ins.
• Georeferencer. Users can pin old maps to modern coordinates, so a 1850s survey can be laid over today's streets.
• Downloads. Many images can be downloaded for study, with terms posted on the site.
• Geographic search. A tool called MapRank lets you search a large share of the maps by drawing on a modern map.

For local readers, a fun exercise is to search the collection for the Santa Clara Valley or San Francisco Bay. Nineteenth century maps show the old rancho lines, the railroad and the town of Mayfield before Palo Alto absorbed it. Pair that with our pages on Mayfield and the Spanish and Mexican era to see how the land was divided.

What to look for on a visit

Every visit is different because the room changes with classes and exhibits. These are good questions to ask the staff on duty:

• California as an island. Stanford holds a well-known collection of maps that show California floating off the coast, a mistake that lasted more than a century.
• Globes. The collection includes globes of many sizes, from pocket globes to large library models.
• School geographies. Rumsey collected the atlases American children learned from, which show how ideas about the world changed.
• Bay Area maps. Ask to see something local, such as a survey of the Peninsula from the railroad years.

Staff are used to curious visitors and will often bring up a scan on the big screen if the paper original is too fragile to handle.

Planning your visit

Green Library sits just north of the Main Quad, so the map center fits easily into a walk around the core of campus. Our self-guided campus walk passes the library. The free Marguerite shuttle from the Palo Alto Caltrain station serves central campus on weekdays, which lines up well with the center's Wednesday to Friday hours.

If you drive, visitor parking is paid by zone through ParkMobile and the map center's own page notes that enforcement runs from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. on weekdays unless posted otherwise. The walk from a lot to Green Library can be half a mile or more. Our Stanford parking and transit guide has the details.

A good afternoon plan: arrive by 1 p.m. on a Thursday, spend an hour with the maps, see the Bing Wing exhibit downstairs, then walk ten minutes south to Hoover Tower for its free ground-floor exhibits. The tower's observation deck is closed until January 25, 2027.

Frequently asked questions