1912 Goad Fire Insurance Plan now available in Vanmap

Vanmap, a geomatics tool from the City of Vancouver, now includes a layer representing Goad’s 1912 Fire Insurance Plan contributed by the City of Vancouver Archives. The fire insurance plan data is also available through the city's Open Data Catalogue. You can read an extensive description by the city archives about the fire insurance plan.

DataBC, BC Government Open Data site opens

On July 19, 02011, the British Columbia Government launched its Open Data initiative through its DataBC Web site. The data that's currently available appears to be heavily weighted towards geomatic applications. The government is encouraging the creation of Apps and provides links to various Tools "to mashup BC data."

SepiaTown, sharing historic photographs the Web 2.0 way

SepiaTown.com is a new Web site that allows individuals and institutions to share historic photographs the Web 2.0 way, via a Google Maps mashup. According to the site, "The objective of SepiaTown is to map a virtual past by collecting and mapping a vast collection of historical and vintage photographs, prints, film, audio and other media." SepiaTown, Inc. is based in Sunnyside, New York. PCMag.com named SepiaTown one of its Top 100 Web Sites of 2010 in the Undiscovered: Info category.

Digitized fire insurance plans of Canadian cities at Library and Archives Canada

The Library and Archives Canada has digitized much of its Canadian fire insurance plans originating with the Charles E. Goad Company fonds. The short form of the URL that will take you to the series-level description of the plans through which you can view lower-level descriptions and the item-level description with the digitized representations of the plans is http://bit.ly/9rcqLb. The JPG images are of sufficient resolution that when downloaded can be used for research purposes. Higher resolution TIFF images can also be ordered.

Fire insurance plans are an extremely valuable archival research tool for environmental and urban studies. Congratulations to LAC on this accomplishment.