Maps & Geospatial personnel have been working with three Bednar interns this academic year and we invite you to join us to learn more about their work and offer them support as they practice their professional presentation skills from 2-3:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 27 for their Bednar Internship Presentations in 403 Paterno Library. In addition to maps and geospatial resources, intern work has made use of library resources such as Ancestry.com, digitized student directories from The Eberly Family Special Collections Library and Social Sciences electronic resources.
Connor Henderson’s (Geography, 2017) project uses Sanborn fire insurance maps and United States census records to explore the spatial arrangement of residential housing in State College, Pennsylvania, in the years 1920 and 1930. One of the final products is an interactive online map that can be used by patrons interested in conducting social science or ancestral research. Additionally, the project serves as an instructional resource for researchers interested in doing similar work on their own by explaining the methods of georeferencing, data cleaning, and analysis used and explaining how Library resources can be utilized for such a project.
Jack Swab’s (Geography/History, 2017) project examines the dynamics of Penn State student housing during the 1919-1920 and 1929-1930 academic years. Student Directory scans from Special Collections were run through ABBYY FineReader OCR, converting the image into editable text, and thus allowing it to be tied into the Maps Library’s Historic Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps Collection. After organizing and cleaning the data, the student records were tied to individual building footprints, enabling the student records to be searchable by both name and location, allowing access to the collection for gemologists and history buffs. Moreover, the project also highlighted changes in the built environment of State College and dynamics in the socio-geographic student housing preferences.
Ben Carlsen (Geography, 2017) performed an inventory of the libraries’ collection of digital geographic data resources, and investigated ways that the collection could be made more accessible to and usable by library patrons. Ben will be discussing methods for importing historic TIGER/Line boundary and transportation data from the 1990 census into modern GIS systems, and potential ways that this historic resource may be put to use by library patrons.
– submitted by Heather Ross, Donald W. Hamer Maps Library, Social Sciences Library