David Rumsey

David Rumsey
David Rumsey at the 2005 Where 2.0 Conference.

David Rumsey is a map collector and the founder of the David Rumsey Map Collection. He is also the president of Cartography Associates.

Rumsey has a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Fine Arts from Yale University and was a founding member of Yale Research Associates in the Arts. He was also a 1966 initiate into the Skull and Bones Society[citation needed], before becoming Associate Director of the American Society for Eastern Arts in San Francisco. He was a lecturer in art at the Yale School of Art 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 and South America. The collection also features world maps which includes atlases, globes, school geographies, maritime charts, and a variety of other maps. The collection is available on his website for free viewing. See:

Contents

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. 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:

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. It promotes the distribution of digital facsimiles both in print and electronic media. Specializing in both primary source documents and cutting-edge technology, Cartography Associates develops tools that integrate cataloging with visual images on the Internet.

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