[Historic] welcome Historic OpenStreetMap, introductions

[Lazorchak, William]

Greetings all, still catching up on the list but really enjoying what I've been reading...

I'm Butch Lazorchak, a digital archivist at the Library of Congress in the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program. We're the "digital preservation people" at the Library, working with a network of partners in academia, government and the private sector to think about ways to preserve today's digital info so that it's accessible at some point in the distant future. 

The program has been thinking about digital mapping from the start, so we've kept our paws in as much as we can. We're separate from the Library's Geography and Maps Division, who are the keepers of the Library's map collection (digital and analog) but we work pretty closely with them. 

I was the program officer on a couple of our geospatial preservation projects:
The North Carolina Geospatial Data Archiving Project (http://digitalpreservation.gov/partners/ncgdap.html) and the Geospatial Multistate Archive and Preservation Project (GeoMAPP) (http://digitalpreservation.gov/partners/states_nc.html).

I'm not a programmer (or heck, even a geographer) but interested in all things digital when it comes to maps. I'm especially interested in learning more about the ins and outs of the tools and trying to understand how they work while also finding ways to "inject" the preservation use case into geo workflows. 

We're also quite keen to publicize interesting projects that use historic maps and make them available in cool ways. I've put together a proposal for SXSW Interactive on this front for 2013, "Why Digital Maps Can Reboot Cultural History" with many familiar names (Deborah Boyer Azavea, David McClure University of Virginia, Michal Migurski Stamen Design, Matthew Knutzen New York Public Library).

David is doing the very cool Neatline project at UVA (http://neatline.org/) that the Library is helping to support.

I first met Mikel at a recent Geo-DC meetup and the idea of leveraging OpenStreetMap to present historic data is something I've been meditating on for quite some time. I'm excited to follow the activity and to see how we can assist. 

Butch Lazorchak
Digital Archivist
Library of Congress
National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program 
wlaz at loc.gov
(202) 707-2603
facebook.com/digitalpreservation
@ndiipp