Nationalatlanten - Entwicklungsgeschichte und Ausblick

Summary

Since the end of the 19th century, more than 100 countries have published national atlases, some in multiple editions. According to the 1960 definition by the International Geographical Union (IGU), a national atlas is a "large, complex geographical atlas of individual countries, containing a summary and evaluation of current scientific knowledge of the physical, economic, and political geography of the country concerned." Based on an analysis of 56 atlases, this paper addresses three core questions: first, whether developmental periods can be derived from conceptual and design perspectives; second, how these periods correlate with the functions assigned to the respective atlases; and third, whether recommendations for future national atlas publication can be formulated. The study reveals that the developmental history of national atlases can be divided into several main phases. The atlases published before 1918 were exclusively bound volumes, focusing on physical geography and closely resembling the physical-statistical atlases of the 19th century. During the 1920s and 1930s, economic themes gained importance, loose-leaf formats emerged, and design became more heterogeneous; the Soviet atlas pioneered the inclusion of chorographic and synthetic maps. Between 1946 and 1960, boxed loose-leaf collections became the new publication form, economic themes played a central role, and offset printing significantly improved print quality. In the 1960s, format reductions occurred, indexes became common, and a clear East-West contrast in cartographic approaches emerged. Since the 1970s, new conceptual variants appeared, including multi-volume thematic sets and continuous loose-leaf works, with increased problem orientation and the use of aerial photographs. From the 1980s onward, multi-volume publication became standard, with equal emphasis on maps, images, and accompanying text; electronic versions were first undertaken at the end of the decade, and design increasingly catered to broad marketing needs and public comprehensibility. Regarding functional change, the first national atlases of Finland (1899) and Canada (1906) clearly served a politically motivated representational function to support sovereignty aspirations. The Soviet atlas (1937-1940) was the first to serve primarily as a decision-making basis for political and economic planning. The flood of atlases in the postwar period up to the late 1950s responded to global political and territorial changes and the immense need for information on economic and natural resources. Today, digital technology is fundamentally transforming national atlases. Canada has already established a "National Atlas of Canada Online" on the World Wide Web, offering customized map services. Electronic atlases based on multithematic databases offer significant advantages: considerable time and cost savings in map production, demand-specific map information, interactivity, easy updating, and substantial personnel savings. In the future, comprehensive national data collections may replace the classic paper atlas for certain target groups, and potentially also regional atlases, city atlases, and other special atlases, with a single database serving as the basis for thematic presentations at various scales, generalization levels, and degrees of complexity. Although a transition period with multiple publication forms is expected, the trend toward fully electronic national atlases, including communication via digital networks, is already underway and offers entirely new possibilities for information processing and dissemination.