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Unbinding the Atlas: Moving the NYPLMap Collection Beyond DigitizationMatthew Allen Knutzen aa New York Public Library , New York , New York , USAPublished online: 17 Apr 2013.

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Unbinding the Atlas: Moving the NYPL MapCollection Beyond Digitization

MATTHEW ALLEN KNUTZENNew York Public Library, New York, New York, USA

Historical maps offer a wealth of information to readers along aspectrum of domains. For the past dozen years, institutions withmap collections have pushed these rich documents to the Web asscanned images. In recent years though, the transformation of theWeb from a series of hyperlinked documents to a network of infor-mation contained within those documents has prompted many ofthe institutions hosting digital map collections to think beyond thepoint of map digitization. This shift has created new opportunitiesto better describe and further extend access to such collections. Italso provides an opportunity to transform such collections into avital part of the larger data ecosystem.

KEYWORDS maps, historical maps, libraries, digital libraries, dig-itization, New York City, New York City Historical GIS, GIS, Geo-graphic Information Systems, historical geography, historical GIS,urban studies, architectural history, historic preservation

INTRODUCTION

In February 2012 the Association of American Geographers (AAGs) heldits annual meeting in New York City where the New York Public Library(NYPL) hosted, together with co-chairs from the University of Portsmouthand Harvard University, the daylong workshop “Working Digitally with His-torical Maps.” The workshop provided an opportunity for a community oflibrarians, archivists, cartographers, geographers, historians, scientists, andothers to report on ongoing, large-scale projects to provide often innovative,sometimes confederated, global access to an ever growing body of digital

© Matthew Allen KnutzenAddress correspondence to Matthew Allen Knutzen, New York Public Library, Collections

Strategy, The Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street,New York, NY 10018. E-mail: mattknutzen@gmail.com

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historical maps on the Web. A number of important questions framed thenineteen talks (Harvard University 2012). What do we do with historicalmaps once they are on the Web? How can we extend, deepen access to, andmake these resources more useful? How and why should we transform suchcollections into new digital instantiations? Where do scanned cartographiccollections and their derivatives fit in an emerging ecosystem of digital dataon the Web?

The Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division of the NYPL (MapDivision) (New York Public Library 2012a) has wrestled with such questionsfor the past dozen years as it converts much of its map collection from paperto digital. The vision informed by such questions and the resulting projects,new technologies, tools, and methods were the subject of this author’s talk,Unbinding the Atlas (Knutzen 2012), at the AAGs program, illustrated andsummarized below. The first section is a brief and general history of theMap Division’s digital projects, delineating how each informed, influenced,and transformed the library’s thought processes in successive projects. Thenext section is a detailed, practical, and moderately technical guide to themethodologies and tools used in their completion. The final section is asketch of possible future directions.

The Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division

Established in 1898, the Map Division has grown to 433,000 sheet maps,25,000 books and atlases, 38,000 microforms, and 15,000 scanned maps(25,000 by the end of 2013). The collection spans nearly five hundred yearsof history across a wide range of map scales and a spectrum of themes.Major strengths include the antiquarian atlas and sheet map collections (to1900), built around the Astor and Lenox Library collections (New York PublicLibrary 2012b), later bequests and ongoing purchases comprising more than10,000 sheet maps and 1,000 atlases, with strong holdings from the eighteenthand nineteenth centuries; property maps of New York City, primarily fireinsurance atlases, numbering in the thousands of volumes with geographiccoverage for the five boroughs from the mid-nineteenth century forward;and, finally, domestic and international topographic and bathymetric mapcollections, both contemporary and historical.

These holdings support the research needs of a broad array of scholarsand enthusiasts who overwhelmingly seek cartographic information aboutspecific places (more often than not, New York City) at or framed by par-ticular moments in time. The following illustrates how some of the morecommon types of NYPL map researchers use the collection: geographersinvestigating the driving forces behind the changes to a shoreline; art histori-ans recreating the scene from a painting to elucidate the extent of the artist’sfictionalization of real geographic places; urban archaeologists searching forevidence of historical land use to provide clues to discoveries in an open

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archaeological site; and environmental scientists facilitating remediation oftoxic chemicals released decades prior by industries on sites that bear littleresemblance to the contemporary landscape.

These information seekers share the common desire to better under-stand a place through space and time as represented on maps. The commontools libraries use to satisfy this kind of geographic information seeking (usu-ally through maps) are spatial indexes and gazetteers. Taken together, theyfacilitate a translation between the implicit geographic information of a placename (e.g., New York City) and the explicit geographic coordinates associ-ated with that place name (e.g., N 40◦42′51′′, W 74◦00′21′′). Librarians useexplicit geographic information to retrieve spatially indexed maps about thatsame place across map library holdings, regardless of whether the maps aretagged, cataloged, or described as being related to that implicit geographicplace.

It is now a given that many map libraries are converting their collectionsinto the digital world, which is the subject of the next section. Subsequentsections detail NYPL’s response to this move, namely, by transforming, em-ulating, replicating, and improving the process of geographic informationretrieval through the creation of both digital spatial indexes and tools for themass georectification of maps.

Digitization

Digitization is a valuable first step in extending access to collections throughthe Web. Since 2000, the library has moved its most heavily used map col-lections through a now standard series of workflow steps, from cataloging(when necessary), to metadata creation, digital imaging, and finally hostingthrough the library’s Digital Gallery (New York Public Library 2012c). Fol-lowing successive digitization projects, we have developed and employednew, sometimes experimental, methods (detailed below) to extend accessbeyond the image gallery.

The Map Division’s first foray into digitization was the National Endow-ment for the Humanities (NEH)-funded American Shores: Maps of the MiddleAtlantic Region to 1850 (New York Public Library 2002), a project that sawthe preservation, cataloging, and digitization of 1,340 maps. A boutique Website, preserved on the NYPL’s legacy pages, was constructed to provide cu-ratorial insight into the collection. The digital content was subsumed into thelarger NYPL framework in 2004.

In 2003 and 2004, the library participated, along with the AmericanGeographical Society Library and the University of Connecticut, Storrs (aslead institution), in the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences (IMLS)-funded grant Building a Globally Distributed Historical Sheet Map Collec-tion (University of Connecticut, Storrs 2003). This project centered on aset of 776 topographic maps published in multiple editions by the Austro-Hungarian Empire from 1877 to 1914. The map set, held in varying degrees of

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completeness in numerous libraries, provides an important link to the histor-ical geography of Europe, particularly for genealogists researching ancestralhistory of any of the region’s million emigres from the period.

Each participating institution created metadata, scanned, georectified,and hosted map images on the Web for harvest by a University of Connecti-cut instance of ArcGIS server. A front-end interface would allow users to entera place name search into a gazetteer, sending the place name’s coordinatesto the sheet index data created by project collaborators. The server wouldretrieve georectified map images centered on the desired search location in amap window for zooming, panning, and navigating to adjacent sheets. Withthe release of Google Earth in 2005, the system architecture was altered to en-able the servers to push map images to the Web in Keyhole Markup Language(.kml) file format, used by Google Earth to express geographic information.

In 2005, the NYPL ramped up the digitization of some of the Map Di-vision’s most heavily used collections, scanning state and county atlases ofNew York and New Jersey (Knutzen 2009) and large-scale topographic, prop-erty, zoning, and fire insurance atlases, primarily of New York City (Knutzen2012a), all dating from the early nineteenth to early twentieth centuries.These collections have grown through further NEH-funded digitization (seebelow) to include more than 13,000 map sheets currently available, and theywill grow again by the end of 2013 to include another 10,000 sheets.

These projects were primarily focused on facilitating global access tohigh-research-value map collections through the creation of metadata, digi-tal images, and Web access points. Each added further value, in the case ofAmerican Shores by framing the map content with thematic and geographicguides, and in the case of Building a Globally Distributed Historical SheetMap Collection by developing a gazetteer search system to help users locatemap sheets by place name. Each project built a large core of digitized his-torical maps around which the NYPL could move “beyond digitization,” toapply the lessons previously learned and to develop new methods of low-ering remaining barriers to access. The next section provides some technicaldetails as to how this was done at the NYPL and offers practical guides andtemplates for map libraries and other cultural heritage institutions to followsuit.

Beyond Digitization: Creating Topographic Map Indexes

The graphical indexes that accompany map sheet sets, as map librariansknow, are vital tools in the cartographic information discovery and retrievalprocess. Coupled with gazetteers, they enable an information seeker withonly a place name in hand to zero in on maps from various time periodsat multiple scales created by mapmakers using different grids and pagina-tion schemas. The researcher would first consult a gazetteer to translate theplace name (text) into latitude and longitude coordinates (numerical data),information that would in turn be used to locate the correct sheet from

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the appropriate map set. Several factors can complicate this search process:maps are produced in many languages; historically, mapping agencies haveused multiple other prime meridians than the currently accepted Greenwichprime meridian; and place names change across time.

The time-honored, laborious search and retrieval of topographic mapswas almost exclusively a paper process until a seismic shift on the Web andin map libraries in 2005 upon the release of Google Earth. With this release,it became clear that many of the processes described could be collapsedinto one interface. Not only did Google Earth provide a text search box thatqueried a polyglot gazetteer, that is, essential translation between implicit(text) and explicit (coordinates) geographic information, it also offered apowerful and free client application for rendering such geographic informa-tion, one that map libraries could use if desired to index their collections.Previously, the barrier of entry for institutions wishing to emulate a compara-ble geographic, temporal, and textual search in digital format or on the Webwas simply too high both from a technological and financial perspective.

While Google Earth provided an easy platform for map libraries to vi-sualize lightweight, portable indexes for their collections, the IMLS-fundedBuilding a Globally Distributed Historical Sheet Map Collection project of-fered invaluable guidance in the creation of such indexes. The IMLS workplan called for the mass digitization of topographic sheet maps, followedby the creation of lightweight standardized metadata records, with boundingbox coordinates for each sheet, which is not typically part of bibliographiccatalog records for such collections (Bidney 2010). This was followed bytranscription of coordinates from the digital image from map corner pointsinto a master spreadsheet for later use. This painstaking work prompted thedevelopment of a spreadsheet for computing the coordinates of the entireset of maps arithmetically based on a fixed set of assumptions, that is, if oneknows the northwesternmost latitude and longitude of a sheet and its widthand height in degrees, he or she can compute all four corner points for everysheet in the set. In the event the set is not neatly contained by a rectangle,outlying and extraneous sheets can easily be removed. A link to a samplecoordinate calculator worksheet is provided below (Knutzen 2012b).

Bounding box coordinates are the root spatial geometry needed to cre-ate an index representation of a map in .kml—with coordinates, one cancreate indexes. The promise of rapid and mass migration of indexes frompaper to digital triggered a search for tools to convert bounding box datainto .kml files. Luckily, they emerged on the heels of the release of GoogleEarth, when map librarians, GIS professionals and enthusiasts created toolsfor generating .kml files from different types of data. A regular visitor toGoogle Earth Blog, Simon A., posted a link in 2007 to a Microsoft Excelmacro (Google 2007) that converts spreadsheet data, that is, coordinates andplace names, into a layer of clickable points in Google Earth.

Building on this macro, the Maps Library created increasingly morecomplicated versions of the .kml generator to, for example, enable the

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FIGURE 1 Topo maps, Austria-Hungary. Timestamped .kml index to NYPL collection oftopographic maps published by the Austro-Hungarian Empire between 1877–1914.

construction of a rectangle from a set of four coordinate pairs, apply HTMLstyling to the information balloons, and control the time stamp, color, trans-parency, and more through the introduction of elements from the .kml stylespecifications (Google KML Reference Documentation). Below is a sample.kml generator, the Austria-Hungary KML Generator (Knutzen 2012c), eas-ily modified to accommodate comparable data from any topographic mapset. One can easily create a .kml index by running the Excel macro inthe Austria-Hungary KML Generator populated with coordinate data derivedfrom another topographic map set. It should also be noted that it is not nec-essary to have digital copies of maps to create .kml indexes. The example inFigure 1 shows the resulting Austria-Hungary .kml index in Google Earth.

Beyond Digitization: Creating Fire Insurance Atlas Indexes

The methodology used to make .kml indexes for map sets with rectilin-ear boundaries cannot be used for maps whose boundaries have a variablenumber of vertices, as is the case with fire insurance and county atlases. The.kml elements are written around each successive row, and woven togetherwith data from each column, for example, author, title, date, coordinates,

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URL. The coordinates need to be in a predetermined number of columns sothe macro knows where to find the data and can repeat its loop unabated.Therefore, for maps with nonrectilinear coverage areas, it is best to have allcoordinate points concatenated as a single string (see below). Generatingsuch data is a task best suited for a desktop Geographic Information Sys-tems (GIS) application such as ArcGIS (ESRI, ArcGIS Homepage) or the freeQuantum GIS (Homepage).

To create multiple indexes for the same location, it is necessary tofirst transcribe map boundaries in a GIS application from either georectifiedindexes or by using paper indexes as visual guides (GIS Tutorials, Websites ofInterest Appendix). It is also helpful to use base vector layers, such as streetcenterlines, with the snapping functions common in GIS applications enabled

FIGURE 2 Fire insurance maps. Timestamped .kml index to NYPL collection of fire insurancemaps published by William Perris in 1857.

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during transcription. The resulting indexes will visually align both with oneanother and with the base street layer in Google Earth. When the boundariesof an index have been transcribed, shapefiles (.shp) can be exported as .kmleither by right clicking “Save as .kml” in QGIS or using the export function inArcGIS (Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, andPreservation 2012). Next, the .kml can be uploaded to Google Refine (GoogleCode Repository), which will, upon importing, inquire as to how to parsethe data, in this case as XML. Then, when the data appears in the window,a click on the word “<coordinates>” will prompt Refine to parse only thecoordinate data and line them up in a neat column. Clicking “Create Project,”then Export as a Comma Separated Value (.csv), will prompt a download ofthe coordinate data, which can then be cut and pasted into the tab markedData in the file AtlasKMLMaker.kml (Knutzen 2012d). Running the macro willcreate a new index based on the transcribed, concatenated coordinates. Theexample in Figure 2 shows a fire insurance index .kml file created using this

FIGURE 3 New York City maps. Timestamped .kml index to NYPL collection of 3,000 fireinsurance, zoning, topographic, and property maps by various publishers, 1852–1922.

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workflow as an overlay in Google Earth. The NYPL is currently generatingindexes for roughly 10,000 fire insurance maps now available on the Web.The example in Figure 3 shows the index for the first 3,000 maps.

This work can be slightly challenging, somewhat technical, and timeconsuming. That said, nearly the entire work flow to create .kml indexes fortopographic map sets, county and fire insurance atlases, or any other typeof map can be completed using free and open-source software. The oneexception is in the final writing of the .kml index (in Excel), which as of thiswriting may or may not be possible in an open-source application such asOpenOffice. The costs associated with the processes, therefore, are simplytime and overcoming the learning curve.

Beyond Digital Indexing: maps.nypl.org

In 2008, the library took a further step, contracting EntropyFreeLLC (nowTopomancy), an open-source software development firm, to build the Web-based, public-participatory map toolkit at http://maps.nypl.org, which en-ables not just indexes but historic map images to be accessed in situ, thatis, virtually “overlayed” on contemporary maps (see Figure 4). This type of

FIGURE 4 New York City maps, fire insurance maps. William Perris, Plate 1, Maps of theCity of New York, 1852. Image georectified and overlaid as network linked .kml in GoogleEarth.

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FIGURE 5 New York City maps, fire insurance maps, map warper, geogrectification. Geo-rectification interface in Map Warper (maps.nypl.org)

access represented a leap forward, enabling nontechnical users to conductspatial scholarship, once the exclusive domain of geographers and GIS spe-cialists. The software has undergone five rounds of development work, andit is completely free and available under a GPL3 open-source license thatgrants broad rights for reuse of the code (GNU Operating System 2007). Thecode has now been thoroughly documented; it can be downloaded and in-stalled on any institutional server (New York Public Library and Topomancy2012).

The tool kit allows researchers to transform digital images of mapsthrough a series of work flow steps: georectification, a process wherebyusers place “pins” on historical maps, correlating them to the same locationson a contemporary base map (see Figure 5); cropping, for removal of allnonmap information such as borders, page margins, and other information

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FIGURE 6 New York City maps, fire insurance maps, map warper, georectification. WilliamPerris, Maps of the City of New York, 1852–1854. Ninety-eight images georectified and overlaidas network linked .kml in Google Earth.

and for creating composite images from multisheet formats like atlases andtopographic map sets (see Figure 6); and finally, tracing, a process for tran-scribing map features like building footprints, city boundaries, and otherfeatures, creating vector data that can be repurposed by researchers (seeFigure 7). Because the map image is georectified, any vector data are nor-malized across the archive and can be mixed and matched to the researcher’sneed.

The resulting data from any of these processes, be they georectifiedimages, multisheet map mosaics, or vector spatial data with attribute infor-mation, can be exported in a variety of useful and interoperable file for-mats such as .kml, .csv, .shp, or as Web Map Services. This facilitates theirreuse in multiple computer applications used for visualization and statisticalor geographic analysis. Additionally, metadata records for maps that have

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FIGURE 7 New York City maps, fire insurance maps, map warper, map tracing, vectorization.Tracing (digitizing) interface in Map Warper (maps.nypl.org).

undergone the georectification process are augmented with bounding boxrectangles, making them accessible to leading-edge federated map searchportals (Old Maps Online 2012).

New York City Historical GIS Project

These methods and tools underlie the library’s NEH-funded NYC HistoricalGIS project (NEH 2010), an effort to convert many of its historical New YorkCity maps through these steps. This three-year project provides the NYPLwith the means to digitize, georectify, and trace a portion of the library’sNew York City maps. Digitization encompasses the remaining 7,200 publicdomain maps of New York City, including 6,200 NYC fire insurance atlas

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FIGURE 8 New York City maps, fire insurance maps, map warper, map tracing, vectorization,Google Fusion Tables. Vector data from William Perris, Maps of the City of New York, 1852.Rendered in Google Fusion Tables based on “use type” attribute field.

maps (Knutzen 2012e), 1,000 NYC (borough-level) sheet maps and, due toongoing metadata collection efforts and work flow improvements in the li-brary’s Digital Imaging Unit, an additional 10,000 fire insurance maps of NewJersey and New York State as well as 1,000 historical New York City zoningmaps. The grant also funds the georectification of 2,000 previously digitizedfire insurance atlas maps, allowing the library to build mosaic images frommany of the earlier digitized map images. The final step of the project is totranscribe building footprints from georectified fire insurance maps to createmachine-readable, GIS-ready, vector data sets representing the landscape ofNew York City’s five boroughs at various points in history. Currently grantstaff project interns, and volunteers have transcribed close to 80,000 histori-cal buildings, with an expected total reaching several hundred thousand bythe end of the grant period in April 2013. Once exported, this informationcan be transformed into a queryable version of historical maps. Figures 8and 9 (Knutzen 2012e, 2012f) illustrate this, showing the data set and 28,736historical buildings rendered based on attributes transcribed from the digi-tized historical maps, in this case William Perris’s Maps of the City of NewYork (1852–1854).

Beyond the New York City Historical GIS Project

It is the library’s long-term intention to apply the same workflow steps toall 18,200 maps digitized through the project. As such, the library remains

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FIGURE 9 New York City maps, fire insurance maps, map warper, map tracing, vectorization,Google Fusion Tables. Vector data from William Perris, Maps of the City of New York, 1852.Rendered in Google Fusion Tables based on “material type” attribute field.

committed to the ongoing production of value-added data sets for researchersand as the raw materials for related NYPL projects. One such related projectis the recently awarded NEH start-up grant, The NYC Chronology of Place,which integrates the data produced from the NYC Historical GIS projectinto a new reference work, a digital historical gazetteer for New York City.The success of The NYC Chronology of Place will depend not only on thefoundational data produced through the NYC Historical GIS, but will take intoaccount many of the lessons learned through the intensive transcription workdone in the course of the current funding cycle. One lesson learned is thatthe tracing process is far too complicated; there are too many steps involvedfor the casual user, and therefore the process requires extensive training.Reducing the complexity of the process and integrating newer, state-of-the-art, user-experience design principles will allow this work to happen at fasterrates, and it is the only way the project can feasibly scale up. With this inmind, the library has slated an extensive user interface redesign of the tracinginterface for the fall of 2012.

CONCLUSION

The projects and methods described above address some of the general ques-tions, challenges, and opportunities that arise as institutions move collectionsfrom paper to digital format. Utilizing a number of approaches, the NYPL

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strives to meet these challenges and opportunities by creating digital indexesto topographic sheet map sets and fire insurance atlases that seamlesslyintegrate with a gazetteer search; building a tool (http://maps.nypl.org)that enables researchers to georectify and visually layer maps from multi-ple periods and export those results in numerous, interoperable file for-mats; building a map data transcription tool to transform scanned maps intomachine-readable spatial vector data; and, finally, prototyping a tool, TheNYC Chronology of Place, to weave such vector spatial data into a coherentspatial and temporal model of historical New York City.

Although useful in their own right, these outcomes gesture toward awider arc well articulated in the proposal made to the NEH for The NYCChronology of Place:

A gazetteer, once built and sufficiently populated, would become a frame-work through which other historical data sets—city directories (lists ofpersons, occupations and residences), newspaper archives, photographiccollections, literary corpora, ephemeral objects such as restaurant menusand theater playbills—could be spatially and temporally organized andvalidated against historical maps. This has powerful implications for digi-tal humanities research: essentially, it provides researchers with the abilityto search by time and place and return a veritable treasure trove of pri-mary source documents from that fixed period and place. For NYPL, itmeans weaving the immense array of rich data sources held in its col-lections, frozen in print and pixels, stored in stacks and servers, intoa temporal-spatial model of the City that can be explored in much thesame way as a present-day Web user queries Google Maps to look up acontemporary business, find reviews of a restaurant, plot a route, or tovisually browse the streetscape.

The work detailed here and in the adjacent pages of this special issuedoes not happen in a vacuum and is not without precedent. Instead, broadteams of collaborators, from software developers to enlightened administra-tors, librarians to funding agencies, have for a number of years come togetherto achieve a common vision that suggests that maps, once digitized, becomea vital backbone of a wider data ecosystem. This network of historical mapdata, once built, can illuminate mountains of related digital data whose webof geographic referents remains buried in the past, disconnected from andtherefore lost to contemporary representations of spatial reality. Our work asstewards of historical map information and our subsequent efforts to collab-oratively disseminate philosophies, methods, and data are therefore criticalshould we choose to collectively advance the state of this art. Additionally,the substantial costs associated with sustainably developing, documenting,and maintaining open-source software, together with the costs of mass dig-itization, indexing, georectification, and transcription of maps, are far too

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much for a single or even small group of institutions to bear, suggesting asan alternative a broad multi-institutional collaboration as a way forward.

REFERENCES

Bidney, Marcy M. 2010. Can Geographic Coordinates in the Catalog Record BeUseful? Journal of Map & Geography Libraries, 6(2): 140–150. Available at [Taylor& Francis Online] (Accessed 08/10/2012).

Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preser-vation. 2012. “GIS Tutorial 10: Exporting Shapefiles to KML to Usein Google Maps.” Available at http://www.arch.columbia.edu/tutorial-10-exporting-shapefiles-kml-use-google-maps (Accessed 08/10/2012).

ESRI. ArcGIS Homepage. Available at http://www.esri.com/software/arcgis/index.html (Accessed 08/10/2012).

GIS tutorials. Web Sites of Interest appendix.GNU Operating System. 2007. “General Public License v3.” Available at http://

www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html (Accessed 08/10/2012).Google. Google Code Repository. “Google Refine Download Page.” Available

at http://code.google.com/p/google-refine/wiki/Downloads?tm=2 (Accessed08/10/2012).

Google. 2007. Google Groups: KML Developer Support Page. Avail-able at http://groups.google.com/group/kml-support-getting-started/msg/aaa8f2c6d142beaf (Accessed 08/10/2012).

Google. KML Reference Documentation. Available at https://developers.google.com/kml/documentation/kmlreference (Accessed 08/10/2012).

Harvard University. 2012. Working Digitally with Historical Maps. [Power-Point slideshows]. Available at http://www.fas.harvard.edu/∼chgis/gazetteer/aag_2012.html (Accessed 08/10/2012).

Knutzen, Matthew. 2009. New York Public Library. “State, County & City Atlases”.[NYPL Blog Post]. Available at http://www.nypl.org/node/72698 (Accessed08/10/2012).

Knutzen, Matthew. 2012. Unbinding the Atlas, [PowerPoint slide show] https://cga-download.hmdc.harvard.edu/publish_web/2012_AAG/AAG_2012_HistMaps_Knutzen.pptx (Accessed 08/10/2012).

Knutzen, Matthew. 2012a. New York Public Library. “Fire Insurance, Topo-graphic, Zoning and Property Maps of New York City.” [NYPL BlogPost]. Available at http://www.nypl.org/locations/schwarzman/map-division/fire-insurance-topographic-zoning-property-maps-nyc (Accessed 08/10/2012).

Knutzen, Matthew. 2012b. New York Public Library. “Sample Coordi-nate Worksheet.xlsx”. Available at https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B-Ng8P9yTR2UYXNyYm12d3IyVEk (Accessed 08/10/2012).

Knutzen, Matthew. 2012c. New York Public Library. “Austria HungaryKML Generator.xls”. Available at https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B-Ng8P9yTR2UaTZ3bDRHdlpoRXc (Accessed 08/10/2012).

Knutzen, Matthew. 2012d. New York Public Library. “AtlasKMLMaker.xls.”Excel file download. Available at https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B-Ng8P9yTR2UWkIxcjdlSEFfYk0 (Accessed 08/10/2012).

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Knutzen, Matthew. 2012e. New York Public Library. “Atlases of New Yorkcity./Insurance maps of New York.” Available at http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/dgtitle_tree.cfm?title_id=1926663&level=2&imgs=60&snum=0(Accessed 08/10/2012).

Knutzen, Matthew. 2012f. New York Public Library. “Perris 1852–1854 UseTypes.” [Google Fusion Table]. Available at https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?snapid=S507471brkS (Accessed 08/10/2012).

Knutzen, Matthew. 2012g. New York Public Library. “Perris 1852–1854 Mate-rial Types.” [Google Fusion Table]. Available at https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?snapid=S507474A2ML (Accessed 08/10/2012).

National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). 2010. “Narrative Sectionof a Successful Application.” Available at http://www.neh.gov/files/grants/new_york_public_library_historical_geographic_information_systems.pdf (Ac-cessed 08/10/2012).

New York Public Library. 2002. American Shores: Maps of the Middle AtlanticRegion to 1850. Available at http://legacy.www.nypl.org/research/midatlantic/(Accessed 08/10/2012).

New York Public Library. 2012a. Homepage of the Map Division. Avail-able at http://www.nypl.org/locations/schwarzman/map-division (Accessed08/10/2012).

New York Public Library. 2012b. History of the New York Public Library. Availableat http://www.nypl.org/help/about-nypl/history (Accessed 08/10/2012).

New York Public Library. 2012c. Digital Gallery. Available at http://www.digitalgallery.nypl.org (Accessed 08/10/2012).

New York Public Library and Topomancy. 2012. “Map Warper Code Documenta-tion.” Available at http://code.mapwarper.net/ (Accessed 08/10/2012).

Old Maps Online. 2012. “Old Maps Online Portal.” Available at http://oldmapsonline.org/ (Accessed 08/10/2012).

Quantum GIS. Homepage. Available at http://www.qgis.org/ (Accessed 08/10/2012).University of Connecticut, Storrs. 2003. Building a Distributed Library of Map Images.

Available at http://imlsmap.lib.uconn.edu/index.html (Accessed 08/10/2012).

WEB SITES OF INTEREST

Clark University, Department of Environmental Studies. 2012. “Tipson Creating Polygons in ArcGIS.” Available at http://enviro.lclark.edu/downloads/CreatingPolygonTips.pdf (Accessed 08/10/2012).

Yale University Library. 2012. “Geographic Information Systems at Yale.”Available at http://guides.library.yale.edu/GIS (Accessed 08/10/2012).

Harvard College Library. 2012. “Introduction to Geographic InformationSystems (GIS) Tutorial.” Available at http://hcl.harvard.edu/libraries/maps/gis/tutorials.cfm (Accessed 08/10/2012).

Pennsylvania Spatial Data Access: The Pennsylvania Geospatial-DataClearinghouse. 2012. “Tutorials.” Available at http://www.pasda.psu.edu/tutorials/default.asp (Accessed 08/10/2012).

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