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Sanborn fire maps

It has been a long time since I have written here, and my only excuses are the general life feeling that there are not enough hours in the day/week/month....

One excuse is that I did finish writing a short book last year that is now out! Framing Privacy in Digital Collections with Ethical Decision Making published by the lovely, lovely folks at Morgan & Claypool. I'm also working on a somewhat related writing project now on privacy and archivists that I hope to have finished up by late spring with colleague and friend Dr Jodi Kearns from the University of Akron.

But recently, my colleague Michael Hawkins and I applied for a grant from the Ohio Local History Alliance, and were successful! We're in the early stages now of packing up the collection of Sanborn Fire Insurance maps and getting it prepared for digitization. Kent State is the holding institution for Ohio, and more general info on the Sanborn Fire Insurance maps can be found here.

We're opting to outsourcing the digitization portion to Backstage Library Works (who I had worked with extensively on the student newspaper digitization project, and were super impressed with their work).



Michael and I met with catalogers to talk about metadata and are planning to create a new digital collection for the map library (which is a branch library at KSU).



And finally, some images from the packing stages from the map library over in McGilvery Hall (one of my favorite old buildings at Kent State). 

We have over 100 drawers to pack up- each one holds a number of folders with loose maps or bound volumes. Since we had used an estimate on the quote for digitization (~7,300 pages), we're also counting each folder and volume as we pack.






More updates to come as the project progresses!

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