OldInsuranceMaps.net

Since 2023, the Institute for Social Research at the University if Michigan has supported OIM and used the platform to create new data to explore the effects of place-based factors on health in the United States. This work is carried out in conjunction with the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond.

Building on their research into redlining maps and spatial inequality, the Digital Scholarship Lab is assembling a dataset of environmental hazards in mid-century urban America. To support this effort, the lab has trained more than 30 student researchers on OIM to georeference over 30,000 Sanborn sheets.

HistoryForge is a citizen history platform that facilitates transcription of historical census records. From the maps created during New Orleans georeference-a-thons, OIM provides web services that integrate directly into both the Southeast Lousiana HistoryForge and Schenectady, NY web applications, aiding the process of finding historical buildings.

In partnership with the Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies (University of New Orleans), we have held multiple georeference-a-thons over the past few years. Through these efforts we have created mosaics for vols 1, 2, and 4 in 1896, and vols 2 and 3 in 1908.

The Technical Assistance for Brownfields (TAB) group at Kansas State University uses OIM to create historical layers for numerous small towns and cities across the nation where they help communities identify and manage their brownfield sites.

To support their community history platform, Yesterdays, MapRVA creates georeferenced mosaics on OIM and integrates them into their own mapping interface, allowing contributors to spatially locate historical photos of Richmond, VA while using Sanborn maps as reference layers.

The OSU libraries have hosted multiple community events using OIM to involve students and citizens in the work of georeferencing maps of Columbus and nearby cities. The team published a paper in 2023 discussing their preparation for the events, and the positive engagement they had from attendees.

The Chicago Urban Heritage Project creates mosaicked layers of Chicago in order to extract historically accurate building footprint data layers for visualization and analysis.

Haywood Mapping Service in Macon, GA, has georeferenced many small towns in the surrounding region, using the aggregated viewers on OIM to facilitate historic downtown walking tours.