Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps have long enjoyed a devoted following among researchers specializing in the study of U.S. towns, cities, and suburbs. Less well known are the various insurance maps and real estate atlases published under other company names—such as Beers, Bromley, Hopkins, Pinney—from the 1860s through the 1920s and beyond. Marketed to planners, developers, and prospective buyers, these urban atlases employed a detail-rich cartographic format similar to the more famous Sanborns: a spatial index to each volume, followed by a series of numbered “plates” that combined scale drawings, text, symbols, and color-coding to convey data drawn “from actual surveys and official records.”
Historians seeking physical access to these bound volumes will find a large collection for Massachusetts towns and cities—sixty for Boston alone—at the Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library. However, as the Center points out, “these physical atlases can be cumbersome to use and difficult to compare across multiple volumes.” To address this problem, the Center has created Atlascope Boston, “a tool for exploring historic urban atlases in metropolitan Boston and telling stories about how places have changed over time.” The Atlascope initiative has “geotransformed” over 100 atlas layers for Boston and its inner suburbs, including, Brookline, Cambridge, Chelsea, Dover, Hull, Lynn, Newton, Revere, Salem, Somerville, Watertown, and Winthrop. Researchers can access this resource on a computer or mobile device.
What makes the Atlascope v2 web portal unique, particularly when compared with the more static digitized map collections hosted by the Library of Congress and other repositories, is the geospatial interface, which collates all of the available “atlas layers” associated with a given location. “As you move around the map,” a documentation page explains, “the dropdown menus with available atlas layers will change and update to reflect what is available for that area. As you move out of the range of one atlas, the app will automatically suggest the oldest atlas layer available for the new map location.”
Atlascope v2 offers a choice of three viewing modes, accessed via a “Controls” button. The default view, “Glass mode,” works like a spyglass that can “peer through” a user-selected basemap to a user-selected overlay map for purposes of comparison. The circumference of the view can be increased or decreased. “Swipe mode” replaces the spyglass with a slider, allowing viewers to transit vertically or horizontally between the base and overlay maps selected. “Opacity mode” allows the user to gradually increase or decrease the relative transparency of the base and overlay maps. Atlascope also features a Web 2.0-enabled “Research” button that invites users to annotate any map, load annotations from other users, and search for geographically related photographs held in Digital Commonwealth: Massachusetts Collections Online. A “Share” button generates a stable URL, useful for scholarly reference and social media sharing.
The Atlascope v2 splash page welcomes patrons with a simple question: “How do you want to start exploring?” The “Take a Tour” tab provides a curated walkthrough that offers a brief geospatial history of Boston Public Library, from its opening in a converted school building on Mason Street in 1854, to its relocation on Boylston Street in 1858, to its current site in Copley Square in 1895. The tour mixes Sanborn maps, real estate atlases, and satellite views. The “Start at BPL” tab immediately puts the user in full control, with eighteen historical atlas layers, a modern street map, and an aerial view of Copley Square.
Historians with site-specific research interests will likely gravitate to the “Search Places” tab. Typing in a place name produces a pull-down list of venues from which the user can choose. Surprises may result. For example, a search for the Charles Street African Methodist Episcopal Church led not to the 1876 A.M.E. Meeting House on Charles Street (for which the church is named) but to its current building site at 551 Warren Street. Atlascope-enabled analysis of ten historical maps associated with the site reveals that three previous churches—Mt. Pleasant Congregational, All Souls United, and Swedish Episcopal—occupied the venue before Charles St. A.M.E. Church relocated there in 1938.
Atlascope's mobile-friendly design features are most fully enjoyed via the “Find My Location” tab. “Atlascope was designed to make exploring Boston history easy and fun,” the website explains, and can help to “situate yourself in history while you are moving about in the city.” Having grown up in Massachusetts and visited Boston often as a youth, this reviewer could readily imagine using the app on a mobile device while sitting in Fenway Park, shopping at Haymarket, or walking the Freedom Trail.
For those accessing the site from outside the Boston area, the “Find My Location” tab generates a virtual black hole: “You're looking at a location where no historic atlas layers are currently available.” Patrons are invited to help extend geographic coverage by sponsoring the digitization of other town and city atlases in the BPL collection. “It can take up to 60 hours of skilled staff and intern labor,” potential donors are informed, “to transform a single atlas from printed pages into a modern, readable web-layer, a time-consuming process.” Here, virtual library patrons gain valuable insight into the behind-the-scenes labor of BPL staff and interns, and how digital library projects are built, sustained, and grown through private and public investment.
Before expanding Atlascope coverage to other towns and cities across Massachusetts, the Leventhal Center should invest in a more professionally designed, user-tested front-end portal that pairs the Atlascope v2 web interface with up-to-date documentation and other contextual materials. At present, users must toggle between the project portal and more general information (some of it clearly outdated) on the Leventhal Center website, draining time and energy better spent exploring the atlases. The Atlascope v2 project is too good a discovery tool to risk losing users at the front door.