For All National Atlas Users
We’d like your help. You can influence our decision-making
about National Atlas products and services. We’re asking
you to tell us about how you use nationalatlas.gov and
soliciting your suggestions for how to improve our offerings.
We’re looking for volunteers who will help us do this.
If you are willing to be considered for participation in
one of our upcoming surveys, please visit our
Contact Us page and leave your email address.
Thank you.
The best way to keep track of changes to
nationalatlas.gov is to
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Q: Which National
Atlas Product is Not Directly Available from
nationalatlas.gov?
A: Wall Maps. These have to be ordered and shipped,
but this might change.
Example of current Wall Map preview
The National Atlas of 1970 was a big book of high-quality paper maps that illustrated America in the mid-1960s. With Wall Maps we’ve carried on this tradition of printing rich and informative maps. We can’t produce another traditional atlas, but we typically make one or two Wall Maps each year. This year our cartographers are devoting their time to creating a new basic map of America that will be delivered in digital forms. So we’re not working on any Wall Maps. Still, we wonder if there isn’t some way to make our current maps more accessible to you and perhaps even more useful? So in the next few months, we’re going to try a couple of new ways to present these maps on-line and we’ll be interested in receiving your opinions about our efforts.
First, we think you deserve a good preview of National Atlas Wall Maps before you decide to place an order. Our Wall Map previews are rather small and don’t begin to convey the accuracy and artistry of the maps.
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To overcome this limitation, we’re working on a way for you to digitally preview our paper maps. We’ll supply some basic controls to view and roam across our Wall Maps. You’ll be able:
- to zoom in and out at will,
- to see detail that’s absent from our current thumbnail previews, and
- to get a better sense of the care that went into making each map.
We’re also thinking about making Wall Maps available to you in the popular Portable Document Format (PDF). More than 1,500 National Atlas Printable Maps are already available in PDF. This time around we’re thinking of producing something called a GeoPDF file – a georeferenced PDF. You can use a GeoPDF file in mapping programs or viewers that automatically keep track of real-world locations. It will also work in your favorite PDF viewer for zooming and roaming. Windows users can download a plug-in for Adobe Acrobat Reader that delivers the added advantage of letting you choose which map elements to display. With this, you will be able to turn map elements on and off at will to create custom views of our Wall Maps.
Please let us know
whether you’re interested in
these enhancements to our Wall maps.
For Professional Users
For professional users of our Web
Map Services, we’ve already updated our
service to support graphic queries. We are also interested in knowing more
about your interest in National Atlas feature and coverage services. Are you
already using these from other sources? If so, we’d like to learn more
about your current applications for feature or coverage services. Please drop
us a line at atlasmail@usgs.gov.
We conducted a survey about the needs of professional users at this year’s ESRI Federal GIS Conference. We intend to do this again at the ESRI International User Conference in San Diego, California, July 23-27. If you attend, please plan to take a few minutes to answer some questions about your requirements for data, maps, and services.
