Most people have spent some time looking at an Atlas, if not on their own or as part of looking for road directions they have at least done so in geography class in school.  As the world starts to get closer together, geographic and spatial information is starting to become far more important to the average person.  This is why a whole new section of digital preservation has really taken off within the last decade.

This is the digital preservation of cartographic information and it takes many different forms.  The primary form of cartographic digital preservation has to do with governments and major cartography businesses taking all of their old maps and converting them into a digital format that will last longer.  This is such a big trend nowadays that companies have made fortunes just on selling technology that allows for precise digitization of things like landmass shorelines and oceanic altitudes.

Examples of primary cartographic digital preservation are numerous, but you can focus on governments in order to see these in action.  Topographic maps across an entire country used to be found in paper map form, but now they can also be found in digital form for people that would prefer to have those types of maps instead.

The governments of the United States, Canada, Great Britain and several other countries in Europe have already converted most if not all of their topographic maps into digital formats, allowing their citizens to choose between a paper map or a digital map for a handheld device when going hunting, fishing, hiking or any other activity that would require the use of a map.

In addition to this type of primary conversion, the secondary aspect of cartographic digital preservation is that companies and governments are starting to create all of their new datasets in a digital format.  It’s called Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and it is one of the hottest industries in the world today.