The David Rumsey Historical Map Collection is one of the world's largest private map collections. It has some 150,000 maps and cartographic items. The collection was created by David Rumsey, who after making his fortune in real estate, focused on collecting 18th- and 19th century North and South America as this era "saw the rise of modern cartography."
There are now over 17,000 digitized maps available through his website, http://www.davidrumsey.com, and about a dozen of which are currently being hosted through Google Earth layers. Select maps are also featured at the Rumsey Maps island in Second Life.
The website presents maps using two Insight viewers from Luna Imaging, Inc.—one using Javascript and the other using Java—from files stored in MrSID format on its server. Maps can be exported as JPEG from the Java viewer.
In February 2009, David Rumsey announced that the entire collection would be donated to Stanford University, including 150,000 maps and their digital images, plus the davidrumsey.com web site (where the images are publicly posted on-line), as well as the database used to track the images.
Famous quotes containing the words david, historical, map and/or collection:
“There have been heroes for whom this world seemed expressly prepared, as if creation had at last succeeded; whose daily life was the stuff of which our dreams are made, and whose presence enhanced the beauty and ampleness of Nature herself.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The analogy between the mind and a computer fails for many reasons. The brain is constructed by principles that assure diversity and degeneracy. Unlike a computer, it has no replicative memory. It is historical and value driven. It forms categories by internal criteria and by constraints acting at many scales, not by means of a syntactically constructed program. The world with which the brain interacts is not unequivocally made up of classical categories.”
—Gerald M. Edelman (b. 1928)
“Unless, governor, teacher inspector, visitor,
This map becomes their window and these windows
That open on their lives like crouching tombs
Break, O break open,”
—Stephen Spender (1909–1995)
“The Nature of Familiar Letters, written, as it were, to the Moment, while the Heart is agitated by Hopes and Fears, on Events undecided, must plead an Excuse for the Bulk of a Collection of this Kind. Mere Facts and Characters might be comprised in a much smaller Compass: But, would they be equally interesting?”
—Samuel Richardson (1689–1761)