In 2022, the Missouri Historical Society library was awarded a grant from the Missouri State Library to digitize 13 atlases and plat books that depict St. Louis city and county between the years 1829 to 1955. Most of these show land ownership at different times; some include features such as topography and downtown businesses in St. Louis and Clayton. This project was supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by the Missouri State Library, a division of the Office of the Secretary of State.
Our department had not done a digitization project of this magnitude since we implemented our current custom digital asset management system. In this presentation we will explain our selection criteria and share the obstacles we encountered including pipeline issues, bulk metadata management, file naming, and image loading failures.
Missouri State Library grants require a plan to promote the funded resource. We used a variety of approaches beyond publishing them to our web portal. These included LibGuides, teaching classes to our staff and patrons, and creating a blog series featuring these newly digitized maps. We also reviewed our institution's schedule of public programs and identified events where we could add content. Each event leads to more interest in the maps.
Next steps include recruiting e-volunteers to enhance metadata through transcription and georeferencing. We are also in the early stages of planning an exhibition featuring historic maps. Emily Jaycox and Levi Cullifer will describe how they responded to obstacles, share initial results from promoting the collection, and describe additional discoveries in our map collection that arose from the project.
