In March 2025, Sue Oldenburg and Francesca Giannetti interviewed Michael Siegel, Staff Cartographer, Department of Geography, Rutgers–New Brunswick. Mike is the creator and maintainer of the eminently browsable Historical Maps of New Jersey, Rutgers' oldest digital cartographic information resource, which continues to inform and delight map fans to this day. We discussed the origins of his site, the process of creating and maintaining it, and its enduring value to educators, researchers, and the community.
Project Beginnings
The impetus for
Historical Maps of New Jersey was a 2002 exhibit held in Alexander Library
called “The Changing Landscape of New Brunswick, New Jersey.” Mike co-curated
the exhibit with Dr. Briavel Holcomb, Professor Emerita of the Bloustein School
of Planning and Public Policy. Most of the maps were selected from Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries. This was an
“aha” moment for Mike, who wasn’t previously aware of the breadth of
cartographic materials available at the Libraries. He created the website so
that that the maps he imaged wouldn’t disappear at the close of the exhibit.
- Mike: “I just had the idea that it was
a shame when this exhibition was over, that all this material would just be
taken down and put back in the drawer. So, I thought, because we couldn't put
up the original material on display because we were scanning it anyway, I
thought I would take a crack at putting some of it online. And it was really
just having access to the web page, having access to the scans, it wouldn't
have been possible if I had just walked into Special Collections and said “can
I scan your stuff?” Because I definitely didn't follow the prescribed procedure
for the reuse of materials, but it was all in the service of service, to the university
and to New Jersey. Along the same vein, I just continued because it was a
little bit addictive, once I had learned how to request the material from Special
Collections. So I kept doing it and slowly adding to the site. I was taking
baby steps because I always assumed that, you know, the next month these large
institutions and libraries would be setting up their own sites and putting
their collections online.”
With a handful of
exceptions, the digital objects of Historical Maps of New Jersey are not yet
represented in the BTAA Geoportal. Mike’s site has been a labor of ongoing curiosity
and love, and the scans he produced and published are mostly what we’d call
access versions. RUcore, the Rutgers institutional repository, implements a
minimum standard for the preservation of scanned digital content, which would
mean that many of the objects available on Historical Maps of New Jersey would
need to be rescanned and described in greater detail. Our wish is to catch up
to Mike’s work, but in the meantime, there’s a lot to be said for good enough
versions:
- Francesca: “There must have been some
sense of disappointment, then, that your work didn't become obsolete. Nobody
replaced you.”
- Mike: “Yeah, but it's really slow.
That's the other thing I learned about the institution. And to be fair, I was
doing this... not quick so much as dirty. If an institution is to do this
correctly, it takes so much more work. You know they need to record the
original dimensions of the primary material and the age, if they have it, and
the publisher. All the bibliographic information. I didn't do anything. I just
scanned it and put it online so people could have easier access to it, which is
fun. It's a great boon for unserious researchers and people doing genealogy...”
- Francesca: “I don't think you give
yourself enough credit. The work that you've done is also quite useful for
serious researchers. Librarians and archivists get in our own way with
insisting on things being done according to a certain standard. So I know why
we do these things, obviously, but sometimes quick and dirty is...”
- Mike: “Quicker, so that's a big that's
a big reason why it wasn't done. I mean even at the Library of Congress, this
monumental process [of digitization] was pretty slow. A big institution with
bigger collections, [there’s] that assumption they have more resources, but
they also have more demands on them and never enough resources and they have to
decide what to put these resources towards. And converting from one medium to
another and doing it to meet standards of uniformity... it's pretty
complicated. You know, when you're actually doing this work, you get to realize
there's a lot more to it than just putting collections online.”
Project Development
Mike initially
focused on 19th century maps of his “backyard,” namely New Brunswick
and other towns in Middlesex county, but he eventually expanded the site’s
scope to include materials requested for teaching and classroom use,
departmental collections, and more recent 20th and early 21st
century examples. He initially found contemporary maps uninteresting, but as
time passed, they became more significant. He continued to draw upon the maps of
Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA) while adding those of the
New Brunswick Free Public Library and Rutgers Geography.
- Sue: “Do you remember the first SCUA map that you chose for yourself,
for the website, not for the exhibition?”
- Mike: “Yeah... there was a 19th century
map of the town I live in, which wasn't part of the exhibition. But when I was
in Special Collections and I saw this, that's where I had that experience of
seeing How Lane, which I drive on all the time in North Brunswick, was the farm
road to How Farm. And Metlars Lane is the road to Metlars’ farm [in
Piscataway]. There's all different aspects of this [historical location
information] that, as I've done other mapping projects and learned more about
New Jersey, and Dutch settlers... You just put pieces together, more and more
names that you might not have registered other than having heard about it. There's
a certain disconnectedness of experience. Like I go to Davidson Mill Park near
the border of North Brunswick and South Brunswick. It's a beautiful park and I
never really thought about the name Davidson Mill, where it came from. Then you
start realizing that all these places have “mill” in them for a reason, because
they were mills and you start seeing these historical maps and you can see the
mills on the waterways, and then you start seeing how the waterways connect
with each other. And, you know, Milltown, which is the town next to my town,
was a mill town. And you see that it's the same waterway coming off the Raritan
River that's running through all these places that I go to but never thought
how they're connected. And it's just a different way of looking at the world.
And sometimes the maps can reveal that.”
Mike’s site has endured many technological shifts in the
way digitized maps are presented on the web. Last year, he migrated from an
HTML website with Adobe Flash dependencies to Joomla, the content management
system used by the School of Arts and Sciences.
Current Plans
With the permission of Rutgers University Press, Mike is
currently republishing work created between 2005-2009 for a book called Mapping New
Jersey: An Evolving Landscape.
- Mike: “Dave Robinson, Distinguished Professor
in the Geography Department and NJ State Climatologist, said some of his
students were having trouble getting it (Mapping New Jersey). And I told
him I would contact the people I worked with at Rutgers University Press to see
if we could get a discount for the students. They said I could request to have
the rights return to me. I finally contacted them a couple months ago and asked
about put[ting] those maps online, even though a lot of them would be dated. That
was a time of transition, when all these companies were wrestling with these
same kind of things I mentioned, you know, like Microsoft Encarta, and all
these reference books were trying to figure out what was next for them and
books were coming out with CD-ROMs in the back. It was before we could go to
Wikipedia but not long before. And I swear if it was perhaps a year or two
later it would not have got the green light to be published. So I've started
doing that and I'm hoping to use it as a vehicle to hire some students to give
them some work. The reason I went off on how much of a transition period this
was, we created the maps with as much looking backwards and as much historical
aspect of the topic as possible, knowing that for the latest results, election
results or whatever, people are going to go to the web. But to see fifty years
of development that led up to where you are now is a lot harder to find.
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