We are a department of the Georgia State Library. Our mission is to collect and preserve unique historical materials that connect the Georgia State community, scholars and the public to the human experience.
Our collections primarily document people and organizations in the 20th- and 21st-century American South. All of our collections are open to faculty, staff, and students, to outside scholars and to the public.
We have nine different collecting areas:
MARTA Early System Planning Collection, 1967-1979, 1992, consists of around a thousand maps and aerial photographs related to early planning of the Atlanta, Georgia, transit system. These maps and aerial photos show what MARTA could have looked like had the early plans been approved.
Division 732 of the Amalgamated Transit Union (Atlanta, Georgia) was recognized by the Georgia Railway and Power Company as a union in 1918. The relationship between Division 732 and the Atlanta Transit System, which lasted from 1950 to 1971, was relatively peaceful. After the purchase of the ATS by the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) in 1971, the relationship between the union and management gradually deteriorated and led to the six day strike in 1973. The first contract was negotiated in 1919-1920. This bulk of this collection contains the administrative, financial, legal, and membership records of Division 732.
The Maria Helena Dolan Papers, 1931-2018 [bulk 1951-2018], consists of a myriad of materials documenting Dolan's vibrant work, life, and activism. The papers primarily contain subject files created by Dolan, containing printed material from many diverse sources with Dolan's notes and annotations, and her own writings. She served as an Automatic Train Control Foreman and then as a Safety and Quality Assurance Engineer with the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority
The collection consists of labor relation files of the various companies that have operated Atlanta's public transit system.
This is an unprocessed collection that contains material from MARTA, including budget information, 1996 Olympics, Super Bowl, and information on various stations. Contact Lisa Vallen at evallen@gsu.edu to access the collection.
This is an unprocessed collection that contains the HR Records for employees of the Atlanta Transit System. Material dated after 1944 are restricted. Contact Lisa Vallen at evallen@gsu.edu to access the collection.
Digital collection of material related to city planning and urban development in Atlanta. The collection consists of city planning maps, city planning publications, demographic data, photographs depicting planning activities, oral histories, and aerial photographs.
The Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA), formed in 1965, is the principal rapid-transit system in metro Atlanta. This collection includes a selection of historical maps and publications documenting transit station plans and the impact of MARTA on Atlanta communities. These items are owned by MARTA and were digitized by GSU Library.
Add maps from this collection to web mapping applications by copying this WMS link:
http://geo.library.gsu.edu/geoserver/marta/wms?service=wms&version=1.3.1&request=GetCapabilities
digATL, The Digital Atlanta Portal (pronounced didge’-A-T-L) from the Georgia State University Library, provides a single online destination to showcase and share the many projects, collections, and data about the metro area produced by Georgia State University (GSU) students, faculty, and staff working with and within their local communities.
This project visualizes how the city’s public transit system, now a shadow of what it once was, falls short of its far-reaching intentions. By highlighting the routes which have been proposed in the development of these systems, this project aims to contribute to larger discussions taking place around the topic of public transit in Atlanta. The displayed map layers were georeferenced from planning documents available through GSU’s Planning Atlanta collection.
During the 1970s, Georgia State University archaeologists conducted systematic excavations associated with the construction of the Metro Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) rail lines. This project recovered the material remains of Atlanta’s past, and these materials represent the single most comprehensive archaeological collection of Atlanta’s history.
The ATLMaps platform, a collaboration between Georgia State University and Emory University, combines archival maps, geospatial data visualization, and user contributed multimedia location pinpoints to promote investigation into any number of issues about Atlanta.
