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Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 16:19:47 -0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)
From: mike furlough <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: sanborn/atlases/web
Sender: mike furlough <[log in to unmask]>
I'm a couple of days late on this topic.
Here at the University of Virginia, our Special Collections
department holds only nine volumes of these atlases, all for
Virginia cities and towns, and mostly for less populated areas.
Those of Charlottesville (1907 and 1920) have gotten more use than
the rest because it's our backyard. Those are both in pretty good
shape--the covers seem to be suffering more than the pages. I
can't say much about the others because I only recently found them
downstairs!
Since we have never had many of these and they have never been in
general usage, our library have typically resorted to microfilm.
We hold a complete collection of Virginia and Washington DC, both
of which are heavily used.
However, faculty have asked for a long time to make the originals
and the microfilm more useable. Special Collections will digitally
duplicate materials upon request of users, and had received
requests for duplication of the Sanborn Atlases in the past. When
Chadwyck Healy first offered digital versions of their microfilm
about a year ago, we evaluated but decided against purchase for
various reasons.
To help make the most requested originals more readily available,
the Geostat Center worked with Special Collections to digitize the
1920 book of Charlottesville and put it online. The results can be
seen here:
http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/sanborn/
This site presents each map sheet in two pieces (left page and
right page) and in four different JPEG image sizes. To find a
sheet, users can view a clickable map index, a browseable street
index, and a browseable building index (both of these were
transcribed from the book, checked and corrected). We have also
included an index to our microfilm holdings, a brief key, an anemic
bibliography, and a brief historical note on the Sanborn Company
written by Chris Nehls, one of our student employees who is
pursuing a PhD in history here.
Our plans are to add to this as we have time and resources. The
next steps will probably be to add the 1907 Charlottesville book
and use MrSID to deliver the images. After that we will look at
doing the other three atlases in our collection that are also in
the public domain.
We don't claim to experts on the subject of the Sanborn compnay or
its methods, so if any of you notice errors or omissions, or have
suggestions for our bibliography, we would very much like to know
about them.
mike furlough
--------------------------------------
Mike Furlough
Geospatial and Statistical Data Center
University of Virginia Library
http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu
(804) 924-3169
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