Request for Proposal: Development for the Leventhal Map Center's American Revolution Portal

Description

The Norman B Leventhal Map Center (http://maps.bpl.org) requests proposals to build the American Revolution Portal of historic maps, designed to incorporate diverse functionalities that build on our traditional website design while allowing for geospatial searches and displays, georeferenced overlays, crowdsourced annotating and editing, and subject oriented UX design. These features will enable users to interact with simple and complex viewpoints, leveraging technology to the maximum extent possible.

The American Revolution Portal, funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, will be an online digital library of approximately 4,000 historic maps from a dozen library and private collections, including the LMC, Library of Congress, and the British Library. The project will provide increased access to a broad range of researchers, educators, and a general audience to these important cultural heritage materials.

The Portal's enhanced functionalities will enable researchers to use digital collection resources within the web, while also allowing for more intuitive search, discovery, and sharing options.

Development of the Portal will be a collaborative effort between the contractor and staff at the LMC and Boston Public Library. The LMC and BPL will provide the digitized map images, repository infrastructure, and APIs to make them available through the Portal, which will be developed by the contractor. The end product of the project will be a web application built using open-source software components that will be hosted by the LMC/BPL.

Responses requested by September 18, 2015.

See http://maps.bpl.org/sites/default/files/LMC_RFP_AMREV.pdf for more details.