| Web Site Review | The Journal of American History, 95.2

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| Web Site Review | The Journal of American History, 95.2 | The History Cooperative

Web Site Review

Sanborn^®Fire Insurance Maps for Georgia Towns and Cities, 1884–1922, http://dlg.galileo.usg.edu/sanborn/. A project of the Digital Library of Georgia as part of Georgia HomePLACE. Reviewed Sept.–Oct. 2007. Sanborn^®Fire Insurance Maps, Utah, http://www.lib.utah.edu/digital/collections/sanborn/. Created by the University of Utah's J. Willard Marriott Library. Reviewed Sept.–Oct. 2007. Sanborn^®Fire Insurance Maps of South Carolina, http://www.sc.edu/library/digital/collections/sanborn.html. Created by the South Caroliniana Library as a part of the Digital Collections of the University of South Carolina. Reviewed Sept.O–ct. 2007. Digital Sanborn Maps, 1867–1970 (access by subscription), http://sanborn.umi.com. Created and maintained by ProQuest. Digital Sanborn Maps are reproduced and distributed under exclusive license from Environmental Data Resources, Inc. Reviewed Oct. 2007.
Arguably one of the most effective sources for traditional and public historians alike, Sanborn fire insurance maps offer unparalleled documentation of over a century of urban development and land use in the United States. The brainchild of the surveyor Daniel Alfred Sanborn, Sanborn fire insurance maps originated in 1867 as a means to establish insurance costs for protecting the burgeoning numbers of cities and towns against the threat of fire. In the Sanborn Map Company's effort to reflect property values accurately, it established the first nationally standardized mapping techniques, which included documenting the location, use, and construction materials used in buildings in cities and towns across the country. By World War II, the company had produced surveys of 13,000 towns, resulting in more than 700,000 sheets. Through its periodic resurveying of towns and cities, the Sanborn Map Company effectively tracked physical change over time, creating a gold mine of information important to historians, urban planners, environmentalists, geographers, architects, and others.	1
Until recently, most researchers had to rely either on copies of cumbersome, oversized original maps bound by their respective years of issue or on microfilmed copies that came with their own challenges when browsing and copying. Thanks to the maps' digitization and placement on the World Wide Web, the public will enjoy heightened access to these unique resources. Frequently, Web sites offering digital Sanborn maps are gated; however, a number of university libraries that hold secondary copies from the Library of Congress's Geography and Map Collection Division offer unimpeded access in a variety of formats and are easily accessible from any search engine. Reviews of three of such sites, and one gated site, illustrate the divergent ways researchers can use the Sanborn maps.	2
Unveiled in 2005, Sanborn^®Fire Insurance Maps for Georgia Towns and Cities, 1884–1922, consists of 4,445 maps, which are currently available in the public domain, produced for 623 Web Site Reviews 133 municipalities in Georgia. One can browse the site's full-color holdings by city, year, street address, named buildings, and county. Index maps in the collection include numbered sections that correspond to individual map sheets that are hyperlinked to its corresponding map. Zooming in on portions of sheet maps and index maps helps decipher some of the smaller symbols. The site also includes a bibliography of resources available elsewhere on Sanborn fire insurance maps. In addition to the digitized maps, the site provides related links, including one to the University of Virginia's guide to reading Sanborn fire insurance maps. Moreover, the site details the process, hardware, and other particulars involved in developing this online database. Due to its easy navigation, this site is extremely useful to researchers conducting primary resource reviews.	. . .

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