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Maps that have been digitized and placed on the Library's website are in the public domain and can be downloaded directly to a computer or flash drive. If you look underneath the thumbnail image in the individual catalog record, you will see a download menu with various scans available to download at no cost. The TIFF file is the highest resolution scan.
Depending on the age of your computer and default programs, it can be difficult to download TIFF files without a TIFF viewer. A search of the internet will provide links to many free TIFF viewers. The Library of Congress uses Irfanview on its computers for this purpose.
The Geography and Map Division is beginning a series of Jupyter Notebooks exploring how to computationally access, retrieve, and analyze cartographic materials in the digitized collections. These notebooks include instructions and demonstration Python code that lead you through the process of downloading and analyzing images and metadata in bulk from the Library's website, specifically geared towards maps. These notebooks are designed to be downloaded to your computer and opened with Jupyter Notebook, an open-source web application that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations and narrative text.
The first two of the notebooks are now available on the Library’s GitHub page External:
These notebooks use the Sanborn Fire Insurance Map collection to show you how to do things like download map image files in bulk.
If this is your first time using Jupyter Notebooks, there are many online tutorials to help you install the software and get started, including instructions for installing Jupyter via Anaconda. To download the two Jupyter notebooks, head to the Library’s GitHub page External and download the individual files. Or, if you are comfortable with it, you can clone the repository.
Inside that repository and at LC for Robots, you will find other notebook tutorials and example code. In particular, be sure to check out accessing images for image analysis External (which the maps notebooks build on) and extracting location data from the loc.gov API for geovisualization External.
LC Labs has released the Sanborn Maps Data Package as an experimental dataset. The dataset contains metadata records for 50,600 maps from the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps collection and their corresponding 440,048 images.
This dataset was created as part of an LC Labs experiment in collaboration with AVP to understand the benefits, risks, quality benchmarks, workflows, compilation methods, transformations, and documentation practices required to assemble datasets for public use in the cloud. The dataset was completed with support from the Geography and Map Division.
The target audiences of this dataset are users who want to explore spatial or temporal aspects of a collection, plot data on a map or timeline, or navigate or explore data by time or place.
The dataset contains metadata records for 50,600 maps from the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps collection and their corresponding 440,048 images. These records are included in CSV and JSON formats.
The dataset is organized by atlas, with each row (CSV) or JSON object representing a single atlas from the collection. Each atlas may represent one or more locations, and is geocoded to a single primary location, usually at the city level.
