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 on Nov. 6 in Manhattan. She was 77.

Her death, in a senior living facility, was apparently caused by complications of kidney disease, said Robert Trager, her nephew.

Ms. Hudson was chief of the Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division of the New York Public Library from 1981 to 2009, presiding over what has been called the most heavily used public map room in the world. 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.

She mounted exhibitions on how topography influenced history on the American frontier and along New York City’s shoreline, and illuminated 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,” Ms. Hudson said in an address to the International Cartographic Association in 1995.

“In the world of early maps,” she added, “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.”

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