Tales from the Department of Geography's map room

The Department of Geography, which has been the primary editorial base for the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography (SJTG) since the journal was established (as The Journal of Tropical Geography) in 1953 (see Savage & Sidaway, 2008), has always curated a map collection.In a history of the Department and the SJTG, published on the 50 th anniversary of the journal and 75 th anniversary of the Department, Victor R Savage (2003: 63) who was co-editor of the SJTG from 2007-11, noted how, when the Department began in 1928, the: '….geography syllabus was limited by the interests of these few teaching staff as well as its colonial underpinnings, as evident in the strong regional geography emphasis on the Americas, Europe, the British Isles, Africa, Australia and Asia, in addition to some level of systematic geography in physical (geomorphology, climatology, oceanography), human(economic and political geography) and practical (map reading) geography.'The Department soon developed an extensive map collection.When the Department, relocated from the original colonial-era campus in Bukit Timah to a new second NUS campus at Kent Ridge (originally Pasir Panjang Ridge) in 1981, a new map room was set up to house the collection, together with a small library and copies of student theses.Over the decades, this collection has grown, along with the wider Department of Geography.Under British colonial rule, the Department of Geography was then part of Raffles College (1928-49) as one of four initial subjects offered under the Faculty of Arts.Students from both Singapore and Peninsular Malaya were taught by three British lecturers before World War II, namely H. Amon, TW Morray and EGH Dobby, who was to be the first Professor of Geography in the newly formed University of Malaya in 1949.The focus of teaching and research had become tropical geography, hence the establishment of the SJTG's forerunner in the early 1950s.More than 70 years on, the SJTG endures and, as noted in a prior Editorial: 'Along with our established remit as a forum for research on tropical environments (including, but not only, natural hazards, degradation of soils and vegetation and their impacts), landscapes and places and reflections on the methodologies that pertain to these themes, the SJTG hopes to publish more scholarship on the past, present and future geographies of decolonization and the decolonization of geography' (Sidaway et al., 2021: 6).Today, our Department, where the SJTG is still edited, has around 40 faculty members and the syllabus has been transformed.In recent decades, however, the map room and its contents had become infrequently used.Indeed, the Department now houses specialist digital mapping/GIS facilities and offers a Master of Science in Applied Geographic Information Systems.To accommodate these, plus all our faculty members and a lively graduate student community, the Department has decided to convert the old Singapore