Monday, August 27, 2007

Historical Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps Digitized and Cataloged






The C&MS Digital Resources Cataloging Team and the CU Map Library are pleased to announce that they have nearly completed a pilot project to employ emerging metadata standards to provide access to a digitized portion of the Sanborn Fire Insurance Map Collection. The digital collection covers the years 1883-1922, spanning 79 cities and 52 counties in Colorado. The maps can be accessed directly from the University Libraries’ Digital Asset Library (DIAL), which allows for downloads of high-resolution images, or from the online interface that facilitates a geographic/spatial browsing of the maps.

The Map Library created separate MARC bibliographic records for the print and electronic versions of all 346 of the maps in the project, and added those records to the OCLC WorldCat, Chinook, and Prospector databases. The digitization of these multi-sheet maps resulted in the production of approximately 2,385 digital images. To manage the intricate relationships between the individual sheets and the maps to which they belong, the team implemented a project to use the Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS) for resource description, the NISO Metadata for Images in XML Schema (MIX) for technical metadata for digital still images, and the Metadata Encoding & Transmission Standard (METS) to bring together all of the descriptive, administrative, and structural metadata for these complex digital objects in a single XML environment. As a part of the project, and with funds committed by the Map Library, a METS generation tool was developed to (1) produce descriptive MODS records from existing MARC records in Chinook, and (2) use the METS encoding scheme to wrap the MODS records with their corresponding image and MIX files.

The next phase of the project will be to develop a plan to use the structural metadata encoded in the METS records to provide additional functionality in the online interface. The METS generation tool will continue to be used to provide METS records for future digitization of Sanborn maps, as well as other digital projects within the Libraries.

The Digital Resources Cataloging Team would like to thank Katie Lage, Laura Wright, Michael Dulock, and Holley Long for collaborating on the metadata provision component on the project. Additional thanks go to Faisal Ahmad, of the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Computer Science Department, who developed the programming for the METS generation tool.

Questions about the metadata portion of this digitization project can be directed to Chris Cronin.


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Great work.