OldInsuranceMaps.net News

2024 in Review + new features!

...and some of 2025 too...

Hello and happy second month of the New Year! It is high Mardi Gras season here in New Orleans and I feel like everything is happening at the same time.

For new readers: Welcome! You can find all past newsletters in the archive.

Also, OldInsuranceMaps.net is now on Bluesky, come be our 2nd follower! I'll post smaller more frequent updates there, and it will also be something people/orgs can tag when they use OIM for events or research. And, don't forget the discussion forum a great way to connect with other people using OldInsuranceMaps.net.

2024 Stats and Summary

On NYE of 2023 I sent a newsletter with a nice chart of work performed over that year. For 2024, I don't have anything that nice to offer, but here are some numbers from last year:

As you can tell, 2024 far exceeds all work from past years, largely owed to the incredible work of students and staff at the University of Richmond Digital Scholarship Lab, who seem to be georeferencing 24/7. There have been substantial individual efforts as well though:

hayleox in Cincinnati, OH • mrileyowens in Cincinnati, OH (you two should talk!) • ekoparker in Chicago, IL • sanborn_again1 in Springfield, IL • mhowell in Noblesville, IN • tagifford in Schenectady/Scotia, NY • Gullimapozo in Gary, IN • lablakely in Waco, Austin, and Georgetown, TX • cliftonmr in Cleburne, TX • Pete_Zivkov in Bellingham, WA • and others!

Plus, of course, a handful of georeference-a-thons (more on those below).

Overall, very roughly, I would estimate we have georeferenced over 1/20th of the entire Library of Congress Sanborn map collection (500k documents in the collection, 38k on OldInsuranceMaps, definitely at least 25k of those processed). Wild!

Georeference-a-thons

Many of these since last newsletter in mid-November!

New features

I'd like to highlight a few new/experimental features I've added in the last couple of months.

Looking ahead

Thank you!

A big thank you to everyone who continues make this project possible. Especially my colleagues and lab PI Marynia Kolak at UIUC, as well as the team at the URichmond DSL and their partnership with the University of Michigan. Jeff and Minh continue to make OpenHistoricalMap an inviting place to map history (checkout hayleox's work in Cincinnati, or Pete's super detail of New Orleans' French Quarter in 1885), which in turn drives people to OldInsuranceMaps.net where they can create Sanborn base layers to digitize from. Finally, thank you for reading this whole thing!

-- Adam