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Video of OCLC/Kilgour Lecture on maps and digital technologies now available
June 23, 2008—David Rumsey, an historical map scholar and collector, presented visual "eye candy" for an audience of about 200 at the annual OCLC/Frederick G. Kilgour Lecture in Information and Library Science on March 19, 2008.
The presentation, entitled, "Turning Private Collections into Public Resources Using Digital Technologies and the Internet" descirbed how he turned his private map collection, one of the largest in the U.S., into a public resource.
The lecture was captured on video and graciously enhanced by Dr. Rumsey. The video presentation is now available at: http://columbia.forest.net/rumsey/uncrumsey.mov
Henry Popple’s 1733 Map of the British Empire in America displayed in Google Earth.
Rumsey demonstrated how his increasing use of digital technologies and the Internet over the past decade has transformed his work as a historical map scholar and collector, and how it has turned his private map collection of many thousands of maps into a public resource. Using imaging software, geographical information system (GIS) and popular applications like Google Earth and Second Life, Rumsey has given new life to old maps. His work has revolutionized the dissemination and our ability to analyze and understand them, thereby unlocking the information held in maps for use in a wide range of disciplines. He offers these software tools and a growing number of digitized maps on his free public online map library at: www.davidrumsey.com
David Rumsey's avatar surveying Giovanni Cassini's 1792 Globo Celeste in Second Life.
The lecture was hosted by the School of Information and Library Science at UNC at Chapel Hill.
The OCLC/Frederick G. Kilgour Lecture in Information and Library Science is funded through a special endowment from the OCLC Online Computer Library Center to honor Dr. Frederick G. Kilgour. The fund supports an annual lecture bringing together scholars and leaders from around the world to share innovative ideas and cutting-edge research.
About David Rumsey
David Rumsey is President of Cartography Associates, a digital publishing company based 
in San Francisco, and is Chairman of Luna Imaging, a provider of enterprise software for online image collections. He was a founding member of Yale Research Associates in the Arts, a group of artists working with electronic technologies. He subsequently became Associate Director of the American Society for Eastern Arts in San Francisco. Later, he entered a 20 year career in real estate development and finance during which he had a long association with the General Atlantic Holding Company of New York and served as President and Director of several of its real estate subsidiaries; General Atlantic eventually became the Atlantic Trust, a Bermuda based philanthropic foundation that is one of the world’s largest charities. Rumsey retired from real estate in 1995 and founded Cartography Associates, beginning a third career as a digital publisher, online library builder, and software entrepreneur.
Rumsey began building a collection of North and South American historical maps and related cartographic materials in 1980. His collection, with more than 150,000 maps, is one of the largest private map collections in the United States. In 1995, Rumsey began the task of making his collection public by building the online David Rumsey Historical Map Collection, www.davidrumsey.com. Currently the online Web site has over 17,000 high resolution images of maps from his collection. The site is free to the public and is updated monthly. Recently, Rumsey has been creating historical map projects both in Google Earth and the virtual world of Second Life.
In 2002, Rumsey was given an Honors Award from the Special Libraries Association for making his private map collection available to the public via the Internet. In the same year his map Web site won a Webby Award for Technical Achievement. The site has won numerous other Web awards and has been featured in Wired magazine, Mercator’s World magazine, and on TechTV. Rumsey has lectured widely regarding his online library work, including talks at the Library of Congress, New York Public Library, Digital Library Federation, Stanford University, Harvard University, and at conferences in Hong Kong, Mexico, Japan, United Kingdom, and Germany
Rumsey received his BA and MFA from Yale University where he was a lecturer in art at the Yale Art School for several years. He serves on the boards of the John Carter Brown Library, the Internet Archive, the Long Now Foundation, the Stanford University Library Advisory Board, and is a trustee of Yale Library Associates and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. Rumsey has contributed to several publications on cartography and the advent of GIS. In 2005 ESRI Press published “Cartographica Extraordinaire” which he co-authored with Edie Punt.