Here at the Map Room in the Queen Elizabeth II Library at MUN, we house the map collection for the library and offer geographic reference services for the university community. To provide this service, we rely on approximately 100,000 sheet maps, nearly 50,000 aerial photos of the province (some photos date back to 1941) and roughly 4,500 atlases, not to mention the gigabytes of digital map data available. So, you can imagine our surprise when we get a call from a person wanting to know if we had more than one atlas! As it turns out, students had been given an assignment that referred them to a specific atlas, so the patron was really asking if we had more than one copy of that particular edition. Still it offered an opportunity to promote the collection just a little bit.
When thinking of maps, people tend to think of street maps, topographic reference maps and other products of that nature. I know I’ve said before that everything happens somewhere, therefore, if we approach it the right way anything that has a geographic component can be mapped. Maps and atlases can portray some very specialized topics. How about The Women’s Atlas of the United States (Call no. G 1201 E1 G5 1995) which presents a collection of maps on a variety of topics pertaining to Women; and Women within the larger population. Another very specialized topic is The Geography of Death: Mortality Atlas of British Columbia, 1985-1989 (HB 1360 B7 G45 1992). This atlas, as with most, not only contains maps but is also full of a wealth of statistics, graphs, and textual information on the demographics of death. Perhaps you may be more interested in The Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology, and Sound Change (PE 2808 L26 2006) that not only maps and describes variations of dialect, but comes complete with CD so that one can hear the variations as well.
The atlas collection of the Map Room offers a well-rounded array (both digital and print) in a variety of shapes and sizes that covers numerous topics from general reference to the very specialized. In fact, you may be surprised with just what you will find there. So, yes, we do have more than one atlas!
When thinking of maps, people tend to think of street maps, topographic reference maps and other products of that nature. I know I’ve said before that everything happens somewhere, therefore, if we approach it the right way anything that has a geographic component can be mapped. Maps and atlases can portray some very specialized topics. How about The Women’s Atlas of the United States (Call no. G 1201 E1 G5 1995) which presents a collection of maps on a variety of topics pertaining to Women; and Women within the larger population. Another very specialized topic is The Geography of Death: Mortality Atlas of British Columbia, 1985-1989 (HB 1360 B7 G45 1992). This atlas, as with most, not only contains maps but is also full of a wealth of statistics, graphs, and textual information on the demographics of death. Perhaps you may be more interested in The Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology, and Sound Change (PE 2808 L26 2006) that not only maps and describes variations of dialect, but comes complete with CD so that one can hear the variations as well.
The atlas collection of the Map Room offers a well-rounded array (both digital and print) in a variety of shapes and sizes that covers numerous topics from general reference to the very specialized. In fact, you may be surprised with just what you will find there. So, yes, we do have more than one atlas!
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