National Atlas of the United States

» see nationalatlas.gov as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The name is older than the web by more than a century. The first national atlas of the United States appeared in 1874 as the Statistical Atlas of the United States Based on the Results of the Ninth Census 1870, compiled by Francis A. Walker, and the Department of the Interior kept publishing under the title until 1997. The 1920 edition came out under Henry Gannett. The 1970 one weighed twelve pounds.

In 1997 the atlas stopped being an object and became a website, and for the next seventeen years nationalatlas.gov was where you went for a map of the United States that you were allowed to use. The USGS ran it with more than twenty other federal agencies feeding it. It served thousands of printable maps alongside the documented cartographic datasets behind them, with standards-compliant web map services for anyone who wanted to pull the layers directly, and because everything on it was a work of the US government, all of it sat in the public domain. It was also the first interactive mapping program the federal government ever offered online, which in 1997 meant something close to a miracle in a browser.

In late 2013 mapping managers at the USGS decided to end the program and fold it into The National Map, the agency's other mapping service. The decision got announced in a news release on 28 February 2014 with one plain sentence about the date: nationalatlas.gov will be removed from service on September 30, 2014. It was. Wikipedia records the death as 1 October, and the agency's own notice says the thirtieth, so the thirtieth is what goes on the stone.

~ the chronicle ~

~ twelve pounds of atlas ~

The 1970 edition is the one people still own. Four hundred pages, 765 maps, fifteen thousand copies printed, a hundred dollars each in 1970 money, and twelve pounds of paper that libraries kept on a separate table because it did not fit on a shelf with other books. It was the first edition published under the National Atlas name proper, and the physical format was the argument: a country this size needed a reference object, not a pamphlet.

The 1997 edition was the last one printed. Everything after that was a URL.

~ the merge ~

The thing that still reads strangely is the usage figure sitting inside the closure. nationalatlas.gov was getting roughly three times the traffic of nationalmap.gov, and nationalatlas.gov is the one that was switched off. The reasoning offered was consolidation, a single source for federal geospatial information rather than two overlapping ones, and consolidation always picks a survivor on grounds other than popularity. In this case the survivor was the newer platform with the broader data remit, and the casualty was the friendlier front door that more people were actually walking through.

~ free as in public domain ~

I have never needed a map of Iowa. What I have needed, repeatedly, is geographic data with no license attached to it, and for a long stretch of the 2000s that meant American federal data, because the American federal government gave its cartography away by default and most other governments did not. State map sheets in Turkey came out of a directorate that sat under the General Staff, and they were a thing you obtained rather than a thing you downloaded. So the National Atlas was background infrastructure for me in the way a power station is. I never once visited the site and I used its output anyway.

~ where the maps went ~

Nothing was deleted, which is the part a government tends to get right even while it is taking your favorite page away. The published data is archived on data.gov under the title 1997-2014 Edition of The National Atlas of the United States. A subset lives on in the USGS National Map Small Scale Collection, and a few of those datasets have been updated since the atlas retired. Around 624 former National Atlas datasets can still be pulled out of the EROS archive through EarthExplorer by searching the Digital Maps category.

The domain itself answers nothing at all now. There is no redirect behind it and no park page either, just a connection that never opens.

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