Librarian Alice Hudson, "who, after enrolling in a mandatory geography course in college, took a detour from her plan to become a professional translator and went on to devote her career to building one of the world's premier public map collections," died November 6, the New York Times reported. She was 77.
Hudson was chief of the Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division of the New York Public Library from 1981 to 2009, during which time she "oversaw the doubling of the collection, to more than 400,000 maps and 24,000 atlases, rivaling the holdings of the Library of Congress, the National Archives and the British Library," the Times noted.
Hudson's exhibitions often highlighted the overlooked contribution of women to cartography. "The women are there, but literally behind the veil of social and cultural constraints that continue to this day," she said in an address to the International Cartographic Association in 1995. "In the world of early maps, unsigned colorists, names masked by initials, widows and heirs without their own names, women in cartographic tomes but not in their indexes--are all lost to us unless unveiled by accident or design."
She told the Times in 2002 that a map "is so much more than a diagram showing how to get from Point A to Point B. Every map tells a story."
In 1977, she was a founder of the New York Map Society, which offers an annual award in her name to students at Hunter College's School of Geography and Environmental Science, part of the City University of New York. She was one of the first two inductees into the society's hall of fame. The Fund for the City of New York's Sloan Public Service Award, which recognizes unheralded civic employees, was presented to her in 2001.
Matt Knutzen, who worked with Hudson in the map division and is now the Linda May Uris director of the Humanities and Social Sciences Research Divisions at the library, said, "She demonstrated, to generations of researchers, students, exhibition-goers, library administrators, that maps provide essential context in understanding human experience as it unfolds across places, and over time."