Geographical Resources

Since I am currently at home, I do not have the luxury of looking at the geographical resources that are present in my library, though I do know that all of them are current as I have purchased them over the past three years. Additionally, I weeded out all of the older atlases in June. There is a variety of different atlases; they are all shelved within the non-fiction section of the library (either French or English) and are circulating books. I find that no one ever comes to the library to refer to an atlas, yet many students like looking at them. Since they request to take them out of the library, I have seen no reason to restrict their circulation. In purchasing these atlases, I haven't used any specific type of evaluation, but will definitely refer to Reidling's criteria in the future, in addition to communicating with teachers in regards to their needs. Perhaps working more closely with teachers will require the atlases to become real “reference” materials and become used more frequently in the library. Also, given the cost of atlases and the need to keep current copies in the library, using appropriate criteria to purchase quality resources is essential.

While I can see the appeal of “hard copy” atlases and maps, I am interested to investigate some of the material available online and see how it can be used in the elementary school setting.

I first chose to use Reidling's criteria to examine The Atlas of Canada. Being a government publication the authority would be good, given that, as Chris has mentioned over 90% of maps are published by the government or based on government sources. Some of the maps here are interactive online maps, while others are printable PDF files. There is a huge number of maps available! The scale of the interactive maps changes as you zoom into the part of the map you wish to see. The maps also each have an abstract as well as links to further information. The maps are current (in addition to the historical maps available) and the indexing of the maps is comprehensive. I can see the interactive maps available on this site being very useful to project on a SmartBoard in front of an entire class; the ability to zoom in and out is great to illustrate areas to students. Additionally, the availability of printable PDF maps would be useful for students.  This is also a good site to find wall maps to order for classrooms. One of the great things about the Atlas of Canada for my French immersion school is that it is available in French!  Overall, this is a great site and I can see recommending it to teachers and encouraging them to use it with their classes.


I also examined Altapedia and like Lori, was uncertain of its authority of the Latimer Clarke Corporation that runs it. I did like the country information that is available at the same place as the map, however. The maps are not interactive, so scale is fixed and may be adequate or not, depending on the need of the researcher. I was disappointed to note that all of the maps I looked at had a copyright date of 1998, which, according to Reidling, would be considered historical. Full world maps are downloadable but not viewable online. The site appeared to have “class resources” with additional school or homework resources for teachers & students, but this area only contained the PDF world maps. Overall, I was not that impressed with Altapedia, and would like to search for a better source of world and country maps.