David Rumsey is a map collector and the founder of the David Rumsey Map Collection

David Rumsey Historical Map Collection

The David Rumsey Historical Map Collection is one of the world's largest private map collections. It has some 150,000 maps and cartographic items...

. He is also the president of Cartography Associates.

Rumsey has a Bachelor of Arts

Bachelor of Arts

A Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...

 and a Master of Fine Arts

Master of Fine Arts

A Master of Fine Arts is a graduate degree typically requiring 2–3 years of postgraduate study beyond the bachelor's degree , although the term of study will vary by country or by university. The MFA is usually awarded in visual arts, creative writing, filmmaking, dance, or theatre/performing arts...

 from Yale University

Yale University

Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...

 and was a founding member of Yale

YALE

RapidMiner, formerly YALE , is an environment for machine learning, data mining, text mining, predictive analytics, and business analytics. It is used for research, education, training, rapid prototyping, application development, and industrial applications...

 Research Associates in the Arts. He was also a 1966 initiate into the Skull and Bones

Skull and Bones

Skull and Bones is an undergraduate senior or secret society at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. It is a traditional peer society to Scroll and Key and Wolf's Head, as the three senior class 'landed societies' at Yale....

 Society, before becoming Associate Director of the American Society for Eastern Arts in San Francisco. He was a lecturer

Lecturer

Lecturer is an academic rank. In the United Kingdom, lecturer is a position at a university or similar institution, often held by academics in their early career stages, who lead research groups and supervise research students, as well as teach...

 in art at the Yale School of Art

Yale School of Art

The Yale School of Art is one of twelve constituent schools of Yale University. It is a professional art school, granting only Masters of Fine Arts degrees to those completing studies in graphic design, painting/printmaking, photography, or sculpture....

 for several years.

Starting somewhere around 1983, and entering into his third career, Rumsey has collected nearly 150,000 maps of eighteenth - and nineteenth-century North

North America

North America is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas...

 and South America

South America

South America is a continent situated in the Western Hemisphere, mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere. The continent is also considered a subcontinent of the Americas. It is bordered on the west by the Pacific Ocean and on the north and east...

. The collection also features world map

World map

A world map is a map of the surface of the Earth, which may be made using any of a number of different map projections. A map projection is any method of representing the surface of a sphere or other three-dimensional body on a plane....

s which includes atlas

Atlas

An atlas is a collection of maps; it is typically a map of Earth or a region of Earth, but there are atlases of the other planets in the Solar System. Atlases have traditionally been bound into book form, but today many atlases are in multimedia formats...

es, globe

Globe

A globe is a three-dimensional scale model of Earth or other spheroid celestial body such as a planet, star, or moon...

s, school geographies, maritime

Sea

A sea generally refers to a large body of salt water, but the term is used in other contexts as well. Most commonly, it means a large expanse of saline water connected with an ocean, and is commonly used as a synonym for ocean...

 charts, and a variety of other maps. The collection is available on his website for free viewing. See:

Awards, associations and books

For making his map collection public through his (free) website, Rumsey was given an Honors award in 2002 by Special Libraries Association

Special Libraries Association

Special Libraries Association is an international professional association for library and information professionals working in business, government, law, finance, non-profit, and academic organizations and institutions....

. The website, developed in conjunction with Luna Imaging and TechEmpower, won the Webby Award for Technical Achievement in 2002.

As of January 2008, following are some of the institutions where Rumsey serves as a board member:

• John Carter Brown Library
  John Carter Brown Library
  The John Carter Brown Library is an independently funded research library of history and the humanities located on the campus of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island...
  
  
• Internet Archive
  Internet Archive
  The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...
  
  
• Samuel H. Kress Foundation
• Stanford University Library Advisory Board
• Yale Library Associates (as a trustee)
• The Long Now Foundation

He is the author of the following books:

• "Cartographica Extraordinaire: The Historical Map Transformed" - with Edith M. Punt - ISBN 1-58948-044-9
• "Historical Maps in GIS" - with Meredith Williams, a chapter in "Past Time, Past Place: GIS for History" - ISBN 1-58948-032-5

About Cartography Associates

Cartography Associates was founded in 1996 in San Francisco, California

San Francisco, California

San Francisco , officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the financial, cultural, and transportation center of the San Francisco Bay Area, a region of 7.15 million people which includes San Jose and Oakland...

. It promotes the distribution of digital facsimile

Facsimile

A facsimile is a copy or reproduction of an old book, manuscript, map, art print, or other item of historical value that is as true to the original source as possible. It differs from other forms of reproduction by attempting to replicate the source as accurately as possible in terms of scale,...

s both in print and electronic media

Electronic media

Electronic media are media that use electronics or electromechanical energy for the end-user to access the content. This is in contrast to static media , which today are most often created electronically, but don't require electronics to be accessed by the end-user in the printed form...

. Specializing in both primary source documents and cutting-edge technology, Cartography Associates develops tools that integrate cataloging with visual images on the Internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

.

External links

• David Rumsey Map Collection: Cartography Associates
• O'reilly Network: Historical Maps Online by David Rumsey
• Wired.com: This Is a Real Quest for Maps
• Technology Review: Historical Maps in Second Life