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May 20, 2010 — In addition to this week's NewsBreaks article and the monthly NewsLink Spotlight, Information Today, Inc. (ITI) offers Weekly News Digests that feature recent product news and company announcements. Watch for additional coverage to appear in the next print issue of Information Today. For other up-to-the-minute news, check out ITI’s Twitter account: @ITINewsBreaks. CLICK HERE to view more Weekly News Digest items.

ProQuest’s New Sanborn Maps Geo Edition

ProQuest is using a proprietary geo-referencing technology to enhance discovery in its Sanborn Map collection, one of libraries' most consulted sources of historical maps. ProQuest Sanborn Maps Geo Edition makes map research faster by enabling users to instantly pinpoint historical locations using modern geographic information. The company says the collection is now the world's largest source of historical GIS-enabled urban maps.

Founded in 1867, the Sanborn Map Company was the primary American publisher of fire insurance maps for nearly 100 years. Popular among researchers because of their detailed descriptions of streets, buildings, and properties in U.S. towns and cities, the maps were digitized by ProQuest to make them more accessible and searchable. Now, the geo-referencing in ProQuest Sanborn Maps Geo Edition overcomes the challenges of finding historic areas that have been renamed, remodeled, or wiped away over time by enabling users to search and compare these locations using modern addresses, geographic coordinates, and geographic maps.

Geo Edition includes a new search interface that enables users to access more than 60,000 geo-referenced maps, covering some of the most populous and historical cities in the United States. Maps can be viewed individually in greater detail with rotation, panning, cropping, and dynamic zoom in/out features. An integrated dynamic overlay map viewer allows maps to be compared and contrasted over time with multiple maps from the same city and against modern day street, satellite, and hybrid views. Geo Edition also connects with other geo-spatial content through GeoTIFF files that can be used to import data into the map files.

Geo Edition is an all-new product that's available through subscription or permanent site license. 

Source: ProQuest