From the Archives — New Archivist in Town

The Mojave Desert Archives is the memory of the Mojave Desert community and the MDHCA organization.

by Chris Ervin, Archivist
Mojave Desert Archives

Chris Ervin

As mentioned in the Mojave Road Report, my wife Leslie and I have recently taken up a two-year residency at the Goffs Cultural Center (GCC). I'm excited to be appointed the first archivist for the Mojave Desert Archives and am looking forward to helping make the amazing collections here more widely known and accessible to researchers.

You can think of the Mojave Desert Archives as a department of the nonprofit Mojave Desert Heritage and Cultural Association (MDHCA). Our organization has many wonderful historic buildings and artifacts on display here at the GCC—the Goffs Schoolhouse being the crown jewel. But the 1,300 oral histories, 110,000 photographs, 7,000 historic maps, and 6,000 rare books–just to name a few of our holdings–require descriptions to help researchers understand their content and context, an organized filing system that allows the materials to be quickly retrieved, and special care to preserve them for the longest time possible. That's where the archives staff come in. They ensure there is physical and intellectual control over every item held in the Archives.

I was recently asked by one of our leading members how I'm going to make the above happen. I've had a lot of time to think about just that. I was an Information Technology (IT) professional for 32 years and I've been a volunteer for our organization for 27. When we built the Dennis G. Casebier Library in the image of the Goffs Depot seven years ago, I was struck by the fact that we had this wonderful building, soon to contain desert-related collections found nowhere else, yet we were lacking an archivist to give our repository the level of professionalism it deserved. Becoming the archivist for the Mojave Desert Archives was something I wanted to do, so I went off and got a master's degree in Archival Science. Last August, I passed the Certified Archivist exam.

In October, just before I left the IT world, I induced my former employer to donate two IBM business servers and related equipment to the MDHCA. They are now installed in the Dennis G. Casebier Library and loaded with the archives data management software we'll be using to document the collections and generate collection guides to be posted online. I'm also conducting a survey of all the collections, their locations, sizes, and current status. This will help us prioritize them for any preservation needs and for creating high level descriptions.

The first pass will be done at the collection level so we can measure just how big the breadbox is. Subsequent passes will drill down into the details, where our superb volunteer staff such as Carol and Hugh Brown, Loris Mitchell, Jackie Ridge, and many others have been concentrating for years. Much valuable work has been done to protect and organize the collections. My approach will not be to change any of the good work that's already been accomplished, but to build upon it. We all want to make the Mojave Desert Archives into the world renowned research center it has the potential to be.

In future installments of this column I'll be highlighting our collections and how we're taking care of, organizing, and making them accessible. I'll also share how we will continue to develop and enhance the collections and, more importantly, how we'll inform the community about the cultural richness and authentic heritage preserved here at Goffs. In the meantime, you can keep up with Mojave Desert history at our blog at mojavedesertarchives.blogspot.com and by following us on Twitter at twitter.com/desertarchives.

Oh the Places You'll Go: 38,000 Historical Maps to Explore at New Online Library

The Digital Public Library of America announces the addition of a vast treasure trove of maps.

A map from Joseph and James Churchman's 1833 volume "Rudiments of National Knowledge, Presented To The Youth Of The United States, And To Enquiring Foreigners" (David Rumsey/DPLA)

Rebecca J. Rosen
The Atlantic

More than three decades ago, David Rumsey began building a map collection. By the mid-90s he had thousands and thousands of maps to call his own -- and his alone. He wanted to share them with the public.

He could have donated them to the Library of Congress, but Rumsey had even bigger ideas: the Internet. "With (some) institutions, the access you can get is not nearly as much as the Internet might provide," Rumsey told Wired more than a decade ago. "I realized I could reach a much larger audience with the Internet."

Bit by bit, Rumsey digitized his collection -- up to 38,000 maps and other items -- along the way developing software that made it easier for people to explore the maps and 3D objects such as globes online. Today, the Digital Public Library of America announced that Rumsey's collection would now be available through the DPLA portal, placing the maps into the deeper and broader context of the DPLA's other holdings.

"I am very excited to have my digital library of historical maps added to the DPLA," Rumsey was quoted as saying in a DPLA press release. "Maps tell stories that complement texts, images, and other resources found in the growing DPLA library."

To see exactly what this means in context, click on any one of the 38,142 results that come from a search for "David Rumsey." Once you've clicked through to, say, this 1838 globe, you'll notice a little module on the right (I've put a screenshot of it here as well) that invites you to "view on timeline." Click there and you'll arrive at a page with all of the DPLA's other materials from that year.

In addition, Rumsey's maps will now be available through the DPLA's API, meaning people who are creating location-based apps will be able to tap into the historical resources of the collection.

The DPLA, as with much of its "holdings," doesn't actually hold anything at all -- rather, they use Rumsey's metadata to make it all searchable and accessible through DP.LA, but when it comes time to look at an object up close, you'll be linked over the David Rumsey's own site. It's not about what the DPLA has so much as how it presents and connects what is already out there.

As DPLA executive director Dan Cohen told me earlier this month, "By bringing them together, I think we're also in a sense making those collections much more usable. When people come to the website, first of all, they'll be able to find a lot of content that exists out in smaller archives and collections much more easily. They won't have to go to hundreds or thousands of websites to find this amazing, unique scanned content from America's heritage and, indeed, from the world's."

Saved from Dumpster: Amazing map collection makes librarians tingle

A Mount Washington home slated for demolition yields a trove of maps, including one from 1592.The acquisition gives the city library one of the country's top five library map archives.

Maps
Realtor Matthew Greenberg looks through boxes in the former Mount Washington home of John Feathers. Greenberg is a Realtor representing the Walter Keller estate, two elderly siblings who are the beneficiary of the estate and property. (Gary Friedman, Los Angeles Times)

By Bob Pool
Los Angeles Times

The discovery that real estate agent Matthew Greenberg made when he stepped inside a Mount Washington cottage will put the Los Angeles Public Library on the map.

Stashed everywhere in the 948-square-foot tear-down were maps. Tens of thousands of maps. Fold-out street maps were stuffed in file cabinets, crammed into cardboard boxes, lined up on closet shelves and jammed into old dairy crates. Wall-size roll-up maps once familiar to schoolchildren were stacked in corners. Old globes were lined in rows atop bookshelves also filled with maps and atlases.

A giant plastic topographical map of the United States covered a bathroom wall and bookcases displaying Thomas Bros. map books and other street guides lined a small den.

The occupant of the 90-year-old cottage had died in February. Greenberg's job was to empty the home so it could be demolished and its 18,000-square-foot lot, near the top of Canyon Vista Drive, divided into two parcels. His clients had told him to rent a Dumpster and throw away whatever he found inside.

But Greenberg couldn't bring himself to do that, especially after he read a recent Los Angeles Times article about the Central Library's map collection. Instead, he invited its map librarian, Glen Creason, to Mount Washington to look at the trove.

Video: See interview with LA Central Libraries map archivist, Glen Creason.

Creason called the find unbelievable. "I think there are at least a million maps here," he said. "This dwarfs our collection — and we've been collecting for 100 years."

Creason returned to the home Thursday with 10 library employees and volunteers to box up the maps. The acquisition will give the city library one of the country's top five library map archives, behind the Library of Congress and public libraries in New York, Philadelphia and Boston, he said.

As the workers went through the tiny house, they tried to piece together the wanderlust life of John Feathers, the man who amassed the collection, apparently, beginning in childhood.

But they had little evidence to go on, and it remained a mystery exactly how and why he obtained so many maps.

Born in Massachusetts, and raised in a military family that is believed to have spent time in the Midwest, Feathers became a hospital dietitian who seems to have traveled widely. He was the companion of the home's late owner, Walter Keller, who arranged for him to continue living there after his own death two decades ago.

Feathers died in February at age 56, leaving no known survivors. Keller's brother and sister, Marvin Keller and Esther Baum, retained Greenberg to sell the property, which is located next to the Self-Realization Fellowship meditation center.

According to Greenberg, it was the "nagging voice of my mother in the back of my mind" that prompted him to hesitate before tossing out the maps. He has a soft spot in his heart for archives and collections; his mother, Marilyn Greenberg, is a retired university professor who specialized in library science.

It took hours for the workers to pack up the maps Thursday. Everywhere they turned, they found more. As the morning wore on, neighbors came over to watch. "John was a quiet, shy guy. But looking at all of this, I'd say the job at the hospital was clearly not his passion," said Michelle Litchfield, who has lived two houses away for 17 years.

Volunteer Peter Hauge was startled when he moved an old stereo. "Look at this!" he shouted. "He gutted the insides of the stereo of its electronic components and used the box to store more street maps. The front of the stereo still has the knobs."

After that, Hauge said he made a point to inspect the home's washer and dryer and its refrigerator and oven for more stored maps, but found none.

Feathers' trove contained both run-of-the-mill gas station and Chamber of Commerce street maps as well as historic gems, Creason said.

"He has every type of map imaginable. There's a 1956 pictorial map of Lubbock, Texas. He's got a 1942 Jack Renie Street Guide of Los Angeles," Creason said. "He has four of the first Thomas Bros. guides from 1946. Those are very hard to find. The one copy we have is falling apart because it's been so heavily used. We had to photocopy it."

Gingerly fingering an atlas-sized 1918 map with a faded blue cover, Creason opened it up to show the National Map Co.'s "Official Paved Road" guide to the United States. The tattered pages illustrated the location of paved roads with red and blue ink.

Creason was also enthralled by the discovery of several "Mapfox" Los Angeles street guides published in 1944. Creason said in his 32-year library career he had never seen one. Also tucked into Feathers' collection was a pocket-size "Geographia Authentic Atlas and Guide to London and Other Suburbs," showing streets, parks, lakes and rivers that Creason dated as pre-World War I.

The house where Feathers kept his collection sits on a lot that has its own history. The site was once used by the Los Angeles and Mount Washington Railway, which was operated from 1909 to 1919 by Robert Marsh, himself a turn-of-the-century Los Angeles mapmaker and developer of the Mount Washington Hotel, now used by the Self-Realization Fellowship. A section of steel cable used to move the railway's trolley cars up and down the steep hillside remains embedded in concrete in a corner of the lot, which is priced at $450,000.

Creason expects that cataloging and organizing the maps will take as long as a year. "We may have to apply for a grant to sort through the fold-out maps and ask for help from the Library of Congress. The collection will take up about 600 feet of shelving," he said.

Veteran antiquarian map dealer Barry Ruderman of La Jolla would not put a price on the find. He inspected the collection Wednesday and discovered that the oldest piece was a 1592 map of Europe. Ruderman described Feathers as "more of a hoarder than a collector." Along with his maps, Feathers also collected tiny bars of hotel soap, restaurant matchbook covers and National Geographic magazines dating from 1915 to this year.

"This person grabbed every map he could," Ruderman said, glancing at a map of Hopkins County, Ky., in the cottage's kitchen.

"I think he wasn't looking so much for maps as they were finding him."

A Treasure Trove of Old Maps at Your Fingertips

A map of Chicago, Illinois, imprinted in 1913 from the United States Geographical Survey’s historical topographic map collection. Image courtesy of the USGS.

by Susan Spano
Smithsonian Magazine

Map lovers, rejoice! The United States Geological Survey, headquartered in Reston, Virginia, is about to complete a massive project to digitize its cache of approximately 200,000 historic topographic maps, previously available only in print or in some cases out-of-print, meaning that people searching for a special old topo had to go to the archive in Virginia to take a look.

Who cares? Geographers, geologists, hydrologists, demographers, engineers and urban planners, to be sure. Also people interested in local history and genealogy, says the USGS. And, if you ask me, travelers who want not only detailed maps for pursuits like walking and biking, but information about what a place looked like in the past. For instance, the course of rivers before impoundment by dams, villages that have grown into cities, vast empty spaces in the West now crossed by superhighways, mountain ranges reconfigured by volcanic eruption.

Some of the oldest maps in the USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection show the Chicago Loop in 1929; Tooele Valley, Utah, in 1885; New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1888; Colorado’s Mosquito Mountains in 1886. When taken as a whole, the collection can be considered a National Map, a cartographic library of “last resort,” says archive manager Greg Allord, containing hard-to-find maps when all other sources fail. Allord says that scanning is now complete, though processing may take until September and some maps found in other libraries will eventually be added.

Meanwhile, it doesn’t take much computer-savvy to search the collection by state, scale or original map name. I just tried it, successfully downloading and printing a 1886 topo map of the Escalante River watershed in southern Utah. What will I do with it? I don’t quite know, but it’s free because the collection is in the public domain and making it broadly accessible is part of the program’s mandate.

A few definitions may be useful for laypeople who want to try it out: A topographical map shows physical features and elevations, usually with contour lines. Topo mapping done by the USGS generally divides the country into quadrants, or quads, bounded by two lines of longitude and two lines of latitude; the most popular are 1:24,000 in scale (one inch on the map representing 2,000 feet on the earth surface), available in sheets that show 64 square-mile areas.

Since the advent of digitized maps, new words have been added to the cartographic lexicon like georeferencing (a method of adapting old map information to contemporary computer-based geography, a study now known as Geographic Information System or GIS) and metadata (background map information, sometimes part of the legend), not to mention technical computer terms like Bagit, TIFF, GeoPDF—but let’s not even try to go there.

There was, of course, no such thing as georeferencing when the USGS was created by Congress in 1879, chiefly to locate and describe potential mineral resources in great swatches of the country that hadn’t been closely studied. By then the government had funded several surveys, marking what Clarence King, the first director of the USGS, saw as a turning point, “when science ceased to be dragged in the dust of rapid exploration and took a commanding position in the professional work of the country.”

John Wesley Powell, the great Colorado River explorer and second director of the USGS (1881-94), believed it was impossible to convey geological information without a topographic component, though he came under fire from Congress for the added expense it entailed. As a result, topographical surveying has long been intimately connected to geology in the U.S. (unlike Britain, which has separate divisions for topographical and geological mapping) and the USGS is part of the Department of the Interior. The oldest maps in the USGS collection come from Powell’s time.

It’s fitting to note that the Smithsonian Institution was a supporter of Powell’s surveying expeditions; indeed, he went on from the USGS to serve as director of the Bureau of American Ethnology, later folded into the Smithsonian Office of Anthropology. And even now the connection remains strong with the USGS and the Smithsonian cooperating on the Global Volcanism Program, which publishes a Weekly Volcanic Activity Report detailing geothermic events that may someday require new topos.