Real Life Special Collections - The William C. Wonders Map Collection

“Mommy, what is the Map do?”

It was a rainy Sunday afternoon in Edmonton and at my three year old’s request we were watching Dora The Explorer.

“Uh, a map tells you where to go.” I blurt out as I let the dog in from the back yard and try to catch her with a towel before she traced mud all over the house. Our day continued in the normal way of snacks, playing, supper, more snacks, more playing until finally the tiny humans were asleep for the night.

As I normally do in the quiet of the evenings, I replayed the day’s activities in my mind. When I came to my answer about what a map does I thought a bit more about my answer and begin to question myself. Is that the right answer? Did I just lie to my son? Will he be forever scarred because I told him the wrong thing about a map?!

Before I engulfed myself in mom guilt I realized that I knew just the person to ask about maps, my colleague at Cameron Library and Maps Assistant, Bonnie Gallinger. I thought about the William C. Wonders Map Collection at Cameron Library and how there must be more things that maps can do. I mean students and members of the public come to Cameron to use the map collection all the time.

At work on Monday I contacted Bonnie and the Maps librarian Larry Laliberte about my blurting out a random thing about maps to my son and asked what else a map can do.

Larry’s response was quick and full of resources for me to teach my son about maps as well as some history on the collection that lives in on the 4th floor of my work home. Larry’s top recommendations for books that teach children about maps are The map that came to life, Here we are, Junior Atlas of Alberta and Looking at maps, where the latter was written by none other than THE William C. Wonders that our map collection is named after and his partner and award winning cartographer Lillian J. Wonders. I placed a hold on all of these recommendations right away and dove right into the old Folio article about the collection that he sent me. WOW! It’s the largest academic map collection in Canada with over 460 000 maps, 5 000 atlases, about 1 million aerial photos, 600 gazetteers and globes! A map of The Marvelous Land of OZ, Narnia and the Surrounding Countries and a hockey map of Canada Oh my!