By: Heather Ross
The suspension of many in person library services during the COVID19 pandemic fundamentally changed the way that we facilitate discovery of and access to physical and digital collections. Being offsite for over a year provided service-providers like me who are accustomed to interacting with patrons in person, the opportunity to refocus on digital discovery and access. One such example is the print and digital map collections managed by the Donald W. Hamer Center for Maps & Geospatial Information. Prior to COVID, I had experimented with creating digital finding aids to the map collections and now had the time to work on them. The finding aid for Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps of Luzern and Lackawanna counites provides an example.
Sanborn Fire Insurance maps are the most searched digital collection in the Penn State University Libraries. Sanborn maps are extremely detailed maps of populated areas that plotted out building footprints and materials in 2×3 block increments. These are often the most detailed historical maps of an area. The maps generally cover the time period from 1884-1930.
While we have an amazing collection splash page for the Sanborn maps digital collection, some maps can be challenging to navigate or are hidden. The Scranton area was one of those areas. There were several editions of the Scranton Sanborn maps created over time, that included titles called “Scranton Suburbs” that did not accurately describe their contents. What started as a project to produce digital finding aids for just the city of Scranton proper, quickly became a project that encompassed an entire two county area including the cities of Wilkes-Barre and Hazleton.
Coverage of Sanborn maps in the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre area.
The results of the Scranton Sanborn digital finding aid have been met with an enthusiastic response. Cameron Neilsen, Reference and Instruction Librarian at Wilkes-Barre, says, ”This is incredible! Thank you so much for putting this together! The local borough boundaries, etc., here really are so confusing when navigating both the past and present, so this was really needed. There are even more maps in your app than I had been able to locate via looking through the listing directly, and of course having the index maps stitched together and oriented correctly like you did is a HUGE timesaver. It was very confusing before trying to line up the orientation of those indexes with contemporary maps since they were not usually oriented to north, and of course chopped up into cumbersome PDF pages as well. All of which is to say that you really met a need here, and the result is beautiful!”
Other digital finding aids for Sanborn maps completed over the last year include Pittsburgh and Allegheny county, and Philadelphia and Bucks, Chester, Delaware, and Montgomery counties. I have also found that creating digital finding aids provides opportunities for collaboration because they can easily accommodate collections managed by other institutions. The Philadelphia area finding aid is current under revision to also include Free Library of Philadelphia (FLP) maps. The FLP has an extensive collection of Sanborn maps of Philadelphia and also Hexamer Insurance maps that predate Sanborn maps. They also provide access to the Digital Sanborn Maps subscription database to any Pennsylvania resident with an FLP library card.
Individual index sheets for Philadelphia, which links to the volume in the Sanborn digital collection
Coverage of Hexamer and Sanborn maps in the Philadelphia region.
Another digital finding aid I created in collaboration with other map collection managers was for the Bituminous coal mine maps of Pennsylvania digital collection. The Fletcher L. Byrom Earth and Mineral Sciences Library manages the coal mine maps, but because of its importance and frequency of use it was another good candidate to create a digital finding aid.
If you have a project that could be enhanced by a digital geographic finding aid, please contact the staff at the Donald W. Hamer Center for Maps & Geospatial Information (ul-maps@lists.psu.edu), for a consultation, we would be happy to share our experiences and expertise.
Heather Ross is the map specialist in the Donald W. Hamer Center for Maps & Geospatial Information.