The atlas of the Slovak Socialist Republic is now being published

Summary

Jozef Jakál's 1978 account describes the preparation, contents and publication programme of the Atlas of the Slovak Socialist Republic. Proposed by the 1965 congress of Czechoslovak geographers and initiated by the Slovak government's presidium office in 1970, the atlas was organised under a 1971 co-publishing agreement between the Slovak Academy of Sciences and the Slovak Office of Geodesy and Cartography. The Academy's Institute of Geography coordinated preparation, and Slovenská kartografia handled cartographic production. Some 140 researchers from 27 institutions participated; the Institute prepared over 60% of the original map manuscripts. Thematic teams and editors supervised scientific content and cartographic presentation, with executive-board review of maps and proofs. The atlas uses a basic scale of 1:500,000 and Tissot's equal-area conic projection; socioeconomic mapping draws principally on the 1970 census. Its planned 830 maps and regional examples in 15 chapters cover physical geography, settlement history, population, economic activities, services, landscape potential and the environment. Jakál highlights new relief and geoecological syntheses, detailed population and agricultural analyses, and environmental assessments of suitability for different uses. He presents the atlas as serving both national and regional functions, with applications in planning, research and education. A Slovak, Russian and English annex was to explain map content and methods. Two chapters appeared in 1977; all chapters were scheduled for separate publication by 1980, when half the print run was to appear as a bound complete atlas.