In this age of Google Maps and GPS, will paper maps become useless? Not so, says David Rumsey. The longtime map collector has been digitizing maps for almost 20 years and opened the David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford University in April 2016. The center, which features more than 150,000 items (including 67,000 maps accessible online), allows the public to compare centuries-old maps to their current-day locations, to see changes in cityscapes, population, and housing—even shifts in land due to climate change. We talk to David Rumsey, who donated his entire collection to Stanford University, and Salim Mohammed, the center’s curator, about how digitizing maps makes them even more relevant today.
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