Digitizing Sanborn fire insurance maps for a full color, publicly-accessible collection

Journal ArticleDescribes the digitization of 1300 full-color Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps at the University of Utah's Marriott Library. Issues of copyright, digitization specifications, digital asset management system (CONTENTdm), and web presentation are discussed

Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps: History, Use, Availability

Sanborn fire insurance maps are an excellent resource for anyone researching specific American communities, buildings, or industries from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. High production standards insure uniform information over time. To extract the most information, the user needs to understand the original purpose of the maps and how to interpret the visual elements. In addition, the researcher needs access to the right maps

Mapping Downtown Honolulu's Urban Past: Exploring the Potential of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps for Historic Preservation

Historic maps are a valuable resource for understanding our past. Historic preservationists, in their endeavor to conserve, protect, and preserve historic buildings and neighborhoods, use historic maps to gain a richer understanding of the places where we lived, worked, and played. This research explored the synergy of using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) with historic maps to achieve a greater appreciation and understanding of the past. The Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps are a set of maps that traced the growth and development of major cities and neighborhoods from 1867 to 2007. Developed as an aid for insurance companies in estimating fire insurance liabilities in urban areas, the maps not only provide parcel information such as property sizes, block numbers, street names and addresses, they also depict a wealth of building information, such as shape and height, construction materials, locations of windows and doors, uses and occupants. When viewed over an extended time period, these maps accurately document the growth, decline and changes in cities and communities over time. ArcGIS software was used to digitize and map the rich source of data inherent in the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps for a 25-block area surrounding Fort Street Mall in downtown Honolulu, Hawaii. Seven time periods of Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps from 1914 through 1993 were digitized and mapped using GIS to demonstrate how urban areas could be studied and interpreted through this particular mapping method. The resulting methodology showed that by using GIS with historic maps to track and analyze urban changes over time, a wealth of information and insight about a community’s past is revealed, something that is not apparent when simply studying individual paper maps

Creating a Public Space for Georeferencing Sanborn Maps: A Louisiana Case Study

As institutional archives digitize their historical map collections and make them publicly available online, new methods for engaging with these materials emerge. Georeferencing the maps transforms their content from static images to dynamic map overlays, and allows for the extraction of geographic data like building footprints or place name coordinates. Many organizations have turned to crowdsourcing to georeference their large holdings, and this thesis approaches crowdsourced georeferencing from the perspective of participatory heritage, taking much inspiration from the idea of the archival commons. To test these ideas, a new extension was created for GeoNode—an open source geospatial content management system—that allows users to georeference map documents in a web browser. Further augmentation facilitated direct ingestion of digital content from the Library of Congress Sanborn Map collection, and a pilot project was conducted to engage the public in georeferencing maps of towns and cities across Louisiana. By the end of the project, 66 participants—from within Louisiana and without—had georeferenced all or a portion of 267 different Sanborn map volumes, creating over 1,500 new layers. These layers combine to create mosaics of 138 different communities across the state, including comprehensive coverage of the city of New Orleans in the years between 1885 and 1893—an especially valuable dataset in its own right. Seamless mosaics will be made from these layers and published via the LSU Atlas data portal for long-term public access. This experience led to new ideas for how to better engage citizens with historical maps of their communities, while the underlying construction of the georeferencing system itself provided insight into how users participated in the work. Ultimately, this thesis lays a conceptual foundation for future efforts of a similar nature, whether they pursue exactly the same technological approach or not

Utah digital newspapers project

ManuscriptThe J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah has digitized 30,000 pages from three weekly Utah newspapers from the period of 1889 - 1922 and made the collections freely available on the Internet. This article describes a new method for digitizing historic newspapers, developed in a partnership between the University and two commercial organizations. Utilizing OCR and newspaper processing technology from iArchives Inc. and the CONTENTdm digital collections software suite, the new method recently prototyped by the University of Utah presents a viable and affordable digitization method to cultural heritage institutions nationwide. In particular, the process can be implemented incrementally, making it affordable for both small and large collections, and the technology supports many different digital formats, not just newspapers. The digitized newspapers are publicly accessible and may be searched full text or browsed by issue. With the recent award of a new grant another 100,000 pages from an expanded selection of newspapers are slated for digitization in 2003

digitalnewspapers.org: The Digital Newspapers Program at the University of Utah

Journal ArticleThis article describes the Utah Digital Newspapers Program at the University of Utah's Marriott Library. Background information regarding the historical importance of newspapers, the current state of commercial newspaper digitization and the problems with small newspaper digitization are reviewed, and the solution provided by the University of Utah is offered. Details are provided for the program's history, funding, goals, and future plans. Other topics covered include the trade-offs between microfilm and hard copy source materials, how titles were selected, the processes and technologies utilized, website organization, displaying PDF files with Macintosh computers, and using bi-tonal or grayscale images

City-Scaled Digital Documentation: A Comparative Analysis of Digital Documentation Technologies for Recording Architectural Heritage

The historic preservation field, enabled by advances in technology, has demonstrated an increased interest in digitizing cultural heritage sites and historic structures. Increases in software capabilities as well as greater affordability has fostered augmented use of digital documentation technologies for architectural heritage applications. Literature establishes four prominent categories of digital documentation tools for preservation: laser scanning, photogrammetry, multimedia geographic information systems (GIS) and three-dimensional modeling. Thoroughly explored through published case studies, the documentation techniques for recording heritage are most often integrated. Scholarly literature does not provide a parallel comparison of the four technologies. A comparative analysis of the four techniques, as presented in this thesis, makes it possible for cities to understand the most applicable technique for their preservation objectives. The thesis analyzes four cases studies that employ applications of the technologies: New Orleans Laser Scanning, University of Maryland Photogrammetry, Historic Columbia Maps Project and the Virtual Historic Savannah Project. Following this, the thesis undertakes a trial of each documentation technology – laser scanning, photogrammetry, multimedia GIS and three-dimensional modeling – utilizing a block on Church Street between Queen and Chalmers streets within the Charleston Historic District. The apparent outcomes of each of the four techniques is analyzed according to a series of parameters including: audience, application, efficacy in recordation, refinement, expertise required, manageability of the product, labor intensity and necessary institutional capacity. A concluding matrix quantifies the capability of each of the technologies in terms of the parameters. This method furnishes a parallel comparison of the techniques and their efficacy in architectural heritage documentation within mid-sized cities

Kingston, New Hampshire 2021 annual report.

This is an annual report containing vital statistics for a town/city in the state of New Hampshire