Digital Commons and A New Map to an Old Atlas

Portland Public Library’s new Digital Commons portal has begun to take shape, and you are now able to view a 131-year-old city street atlas online. Here in the Main Library’s Portland Room, the Library’s homebase for Special Collections and Archives, we have conserved an 1882 Goodwin Atlas, and now present a digitized access of this great work to you, via Digital Commons.

Click on the screen shot (below) for the Digital Commons home page:

The link for the Goodwin Atlas is below, or use this URL: http://digitalcommons.portlandlibrary.com/goodwinatlas/

Beginning with the conservation of the 18 x 24″ atlas, the original binding had broken (see photo below) after more than a century of use.  The Library’s copy of this atlas had been inked by hand, and the City Engineer, William Goodwin autographed each of the plates.

The maps are highly detailed, and show “footprints” of buildings, utility lines, and streets. The city-wide assessment that coincided with this unusual set of maps represents Portland shortly before the merging of the once separate municipality of Deering. The pre-1899 city boundaries are well-marked in Goodwin, and can be seen in maps that include Douglass Street, Brighton Avenue (then known as the County Road), Deering Avenue (then known as Grove Street), and Forest Avenue (then known as Green Street). When you search for Monument Square, you’ll find Market Square.

Along with the atlas’s binding, many of the plates (pages) needed to be conserved. Fortunately, the plates were printed on a thick, vellum-style paper stock.

The photo below, shows the completely repaired binding and textblock- entirely conserved in the Portland Room-

with archival material.

The photo immediately below shows how we repair paper, from the verso (rear) of the maps themselves, to keep the information as readable as possible. We use handmade Japanese kozo tissue, and our own mixture of methylcellulose and PVA water-based adhesives. The repairs are lightly heat-dried and pressed.

The New binding (above), with the preserved original label from the Portland City Clerk’s Office, plus a special archival box (below)  for the atlas.

With the scanned Atlas plates, we’ve mounted downloadable jpeg files onto Digital Commons. In the photo below, subject analyses for each Portland neighborhood represented in the Atlas are being added as searchable metadata tags.

Enjoy this new resource of a gem from the 19th century!