Tag Archives: digitization

More Plat Books Available Online

We’ve gone through another round of digitization through the Minnesota Digital Library. This time, we chose to have 3 unusual plat books digitized. All three have hardcovers, but appear to have been specially made as scrapbooks, where the maps have been cut from another source and pasted onto the pages of the books.

All came from the collection of John Vertin, who was a land dealer and insurance agent in Little Falls. He was also city treasurer for 40 years. The plat books date 1902, c. 1902-1907, and c. 1912. We know of no other copies of plat books from these dates, so digitizing them was the best way we could find to preserve them while still allowing access to the data within.

The books can be found on Minnesota Reflections under the Morrison County Historical Society’s collections.

Morrison County Resources on Google Books

The number of research resources online has increased exponentially since the Morrison County Historical Society first went online with its website in 2002. This week, I found a couple of key Morrison County resources online that we regularly use in-house. Google Books has digitized the “History of the Upper Mississippi Valley” and Clara Fuller’s “History of Morrison and Todd Counties, Minnesota.”

The Fuller history is a two-volume set that was published in 1915. The first volume contains general historical information about Morrison and Todd Counties, and the second volume contains biographies of residents from the two counties.

The “History of the Upper Mississippi Valley” was published by the Minnesota Historical Company in 1881. It includes a chapter on Morrison County’s early history, broken down by township and community, and includes mini-biographies of early residents.

Google Books digitized these books in February 2008. Optical character recognition technology was probably used to index the books. Because of this, you’ll find spelling errors within the plain text view of the books (i.e. PREFACE is spelled PBEFACE, LAKE SUPERIOR is spelled LAKE STTPERIOB). For this reason, it’s better to read the books online in page image view, which seems to be the default. You have the option of magnifying the pages in order to more easily read them.