Plenary Session of the Commission on National Atlases of the International Geographical Union, 7-12 September, 1962, Budapest

Summary

This document is a report of the plenary session of the Commission on National Atlases of the International Geographical Union (IGU), held in Budapest from 7 to 11 September 1962. It begins by listing the delegates in attendance, including geographers and cartographic experts from the USA, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the UK, France, India, Poland, Hungary, Morocco, the German Democratic Republic, Spain, Sweden, and the Soviet Union. The venue of the session (Hungarian Academy of Sciences) and the site and organizers of the National Atlases Exhibition are also specified. During the opening ceremony, addresses were delivered by Prof. Lajos Ligeti, Vice-President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and Prof. Sándor Radó, President of the Hungarian National Committee of the IGU, emphasizing the importance of national atlases in depicting a country's natural, economic, and cultural conditions, as well as the Commission's role in coordinating compilation principles and fostering international scientific cooperation. The main body of the report comprises numerous scholarly papers covering the progress of national atlas compilation in various countries (e.g., USA, Austria, India, Poland, Czechoslovakia, GDR, Morocco, Bulgaria, Hungary, USSR, Belgium, Spain, UK), atlas updating, representation of industries, automatic plotting techniques for thematic maps, the bibliography of national atlases, legend unification, and the international 1:1,000,000 map of the world. The report concludes with the resolutions adopted by the session (in English and French) and an index of exhibited national atlases, listing representative publications from countries including Finland, France, Ghana, Great Britain, Hungary, India, Italy, Israel, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, Norway, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, the Federal Republic of Germany, South Africa, the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, El Salvador, Sierra Leone, Sweden, Tanganyika, Turkey, and the Soviet Union.