Charting Her Own Course

Map librarian Johnson retires after 29 years

Jenny Marie Johnson ’84 LAS, MS ’85 LIS, tied the perfect bow on her professional career by beginning and ending in exactly the same beloved place.

“I decided . . . before I finished my two degrees [at Illinois] that I wanted to run this library,” she said. “Not only did I know that I wanted to be in the Map Library, I knew that I wanted to do this work in this space with these materials with these patrons.”

And Johnson did just that. After spending 11 years at other university libraries, she circled back to the University of Illinois in 1997, where she headed the Map Library for the next 29 years.

The unit, located on the fourth floor of the Main Library, comprises a repository of more than 630,000 items, including maps, atlases, and Illinois aerial photography flown between 1935 and 2005. Its scope spans everything from a 17th-century artifact to the first comic-book depiction of Wakanda, the fictional African country created by Marvel Comics. Under Johnson’s leadership, the collection has increased by nearly 96,000 items.

Johnson came to love maps and librarianship after switching her undergraduate major from premed to geography. An internship at the National Geographic Society raised her profile and helped her obtain a student worker position at Illinois’ Map Library. There she stayed through her senior year and the year after that as she earned a degree in library and information science.

When Johnson looks at a two-dimensional map, she sees more than a path from points A to B. Arising from the surface is not mere geography but a sense of the era and the mapmakers themselves. That point of view “is usually grounded in the perceptions of the individual who made the map or the organization that directed the map be made,” Johnson said. “Those things come through in the words you choose, and in the layouts you choose, and the colors you choose,” not to mention the subject matter itself.

“You need to be able to read maps in the context, so the map also reflects the time period,” she said. In that light, the Map Library’s possessions chronicle not only topography but topics of interest of certain eras.

Johnson’s particular emphases in building the collection have been on gathering maps that appeal to the broader population (not just the elite) and maps that reflect that population. “I want our students to be able to come into the Map Library . . . and find themselves,” she said, “to see themselves in our collection.”

And sometimes the collection reveals Johnson’s own penchant for the unconventional. “I bought some really quirky stuff,” she said of her time at Illinois. So in addition to serious maps such as the Civil War’s Andersonville prison camp and commemorations of world events, one can find depictions of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth, the gangs of Chicago, and horses from around the world.

Johnson, who retired in May, recalls her parents’ dubious reaction when, as an undergraduate, she switched her studies from the hard to the social sciences. To paraphrase the poet Robert Frost, Johnson took the road less taken, but the journey made all the difference, rewarding her—and her library patrons—many times over.