Founded in 1867 by D. A. Sanborn, the Sanborn Map Company was the primary American publisher of fire insurance maps for nearly 100 years. Sanborn maps are the most frequently consulted maps in both public and academic libraries. Sanborn maps are valuable historical tools for urban specialists, social historians, architects, geographers, genealogists, local historians, planners, environmentalists and anyone who wants to learn about the history, growth, and development of American cities, towns, and neighborhoods. They are large-scale plans containing data that can be used to estimate the potential risk for urban structures. This includes information such as the outline of each building, the size, shape and construction materials, heights, and function of structures, location of windows and doors. The maps also give street names, street and sidewalk widths, property boundaries, building use, and house and block numbers. Seven or eight different editions represent some areas.

Textual information on construction details (for example, steel beams or reinforced walls) is often given on the plans while shading indicates different building materials. Extensive information on building use is given, ranging from symbols for generic terms such as stable, garage, and warehouse to names of owners of factories and details on what was manufactured in them. In the case of large factories or commercial buildings, even individual rooms and the uses to which they were put are recorded on the maps. Other features shown include pipelines, railroads, wells, dumps, and heavy machinery.

The paragraphs above were taken from the "About Digital Sanborn Maps" page on the ProQuest Information and Learning Company site. New Orleans Public Library has access to Sanborn Maps for the city of New Orleans for the period 1885-1994. The Library owns original volumes starting with the 1908/1909 series, continuing through the volumes produced in 1994. For the Sanborns dating from the 1880s and 1890s, NOPL access is limited to microfilm copies and the online versions provided by subscription through ProQuest.

The New Orleans Sanborns follow a more or less standard volume/page system starting with the 1908/1909 series. Published indexes to the volumes from that series forward make it a fairly simple task to identify the volume and page for any given address in the Crescent City. However, there are no separately published indexes for the volumes produced in the 1880s and 1890s. This online index is intended to provide ready access to volume/page references for addresses appearing in those early volumes. We have also provided a transcription of the published index to the 1908/1909 set.