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 also known as PULSA, a group of artists working with electronic technologies. He was also a 1966 initiate into the Skull and Bones Society, before becoming Associate Director of the American Society for Eastern Arts in San Francisco. Later, he entered a 20 year career in real estate development and finance during which he had a long association with Charles Feeney's General Atlantic Holding Company of New York and served as President and Director of several of its real estate subsidiaries; General Atlantic eventually became the Atlantic Philanthropies, a Bermuda based philanthropic foundation that is one of the world's largest charities.Rumsey was a lecturer in art at the Yale School of Art for several years. He has lectured widely regarding his online library work, including talks at the Library of Congress, New York Public Library, Digital Library Federation, Stanford University, Harvard University, Where 2.0, O'Reilly Open Source Convention, and at conferences in Hong Kong, Mexico, Japan, United Kingdom, and Germany.Starting in the early 1980s, 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.In February 2009, David Rumsey announced that the entire collection would be donated to Stanford University including 150,000 maps and their digital images, as well as the database used to track the images. Stanford will house the collection in a new David Rumsey Map Center to be built in the main library. The davidrumsey.com web site (where the images are posted on-line) will continue as a separate public resource.See:
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