Early last month I attended Code4Lib 2026 in Philadelphia, and gave a presentation called Old Maps for New Apps: Making and Using Georeferenced Sanborn Maps at Scale. It was a short one, 10 minutes, and while at first I thought I would be too pressed for time to give a full overview of OldInsuranceMaps.net to a new audience, I changed things around from how I usually do them and I’m really happy with how it turned out. Per Code4Lib norms I’ve made my slides available on Zenodo.
I also facilitated an after-conference workshop, Running a Community Georeferencing Event, and five people came to learn about how OIM can be used for collaborative work at community events. We worked on Camden, N.J., 1885, and also a bit on Helena, MT, 1888 where one of the attendees was from. Shoutout to kcamanch1 for completing Camden even after we finished the workshop!
It was my first time at Code4Lib and I really enjoyed it! As I don’t work in a library many of the talks were not especially relevant to my day-to-day endeavors, but I did like seeing topics discussed that I had learned about in grad school, like BibFrame and EAD, and of course the ever-present dilemma of how to handle all of these bot scrapers… I especially enjoyed Brandon Nightingale’s keynote about digitizing historical newspapers at the Black Press Archive (Howard University). “Digitizing is not passive work, it is architecture”, i.e. the structure of a digital archive determines how useful it can be in the future. This is an approach to the work that certainly resonates with me.
