Orientation

Welcome, fellow traveller!

Here you can find information about the key features of Oculi Mundi — the Eyes of the World.

Background

Curious to know how The Sunderland Collection started, or what Oculi Mundi is all about? Click here

Accessibility

Oculi Mundi aims to be as accessible as possible. It should run smoothly on different Internet speeds and has been designed to be used smoothly on mobile phones, tables, laptops, and PCs.

Accessibility toggles and buttons have been built into the entire platform, for users who prefer varying sizes of fonts, contrast, less animation, voiceovers, and Alt Text.

If you experience any problems accessing Oculi Mundi or would like to suggest improvements, please Contact Us!

Collection Environments

Oculi Mundi is the online home of The Sunderland Collection, a private curation of maps, atlases, globes, and books of knowledge.

We want to make the Collection as accessible as possible for study or the simple joy of browsing.

For that reason, you will find two environments for exploring the Collection: Explore and Research.

Explore mode presents beautiful images in a cluster, where you can browse and filter. You can peek inside the atlases and books to see internal maps and plates; you can view items at scale, and you can zoom in at super high resolution. An overview of each object is provided in text.

In Research mode, the Collection's objects are displayed in a more traditional way — but the functions are the same. You can filter or browse, view internal pages, and see items to scale. In this mode, full catalogue information is provided about each object.

Need more information, like a text page from an atlas? Drop us a line using the Contact Us form.

References

The ancient map world is huge! We have provided a References area that presents helpful background information and context.

In this section, you can find biographies of map-makers and other characters, look up terms in the Glossary, and explore our Timeline, which shows the items from The Sunderland Collection in order of time, alongside famous historical events.

Stories

The stories zone is just getting started. Here, we will feature articles and videos of different lengths, on all kinds of themes relating to ancient cartography and The Sunderland Collection.

To begin, check out How to Read a Map!

If you have a great idea for a story or would love to know about a specific topic of item from the Collection, please let us know using the Contact Us form.