Publishing a Sanborn Map Service in 2025

Sanborn map atlases, originally created for fire insurance assessments in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, provide detailed insights into building characteristics and urban infrastructure. Despite their obsolescence as insurance tools by the 1950s, these maps have found new relevance in several academic fields, including urban planning and digital humanities, where they can support a variety of inquiries or community engagement. Using the example of Duluth, Minnesota, this paper outlines the technical processes involved in creating a web-based map tile service from scans of Sanborn map sheets, detailing the steps of acquiring, georeferencing, stitching, and tiling/publishing the scanned images. It also addresses the challenges of this labor-intensive endeavor, considering the potential of automation and crowdsourcing manage the burden, and concluding that better recognition of this type of scholarly practices is needed in academia.