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UO gives atlas to Oregon schools By JOHN DARLING After the second edition of "Atlas of Oregon" hit bookstores this week, its proud godfather, University of Oregon President Dave Frohnmayer, gave copies to area school libraries to mark UO's 125th birthday. The 320-page state atlas is a "wonderful treasure with 700 new maps covering every imaginable subject," said Frohnmayer, including roads, rivers, temperatures, soils, vegetation, basins, earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides, ethnic makeup, crime, newspapers, broadcasters, geological ages, school districts, land ownership, energy sources, ice age lakes, floods, Native American immigration, tribal regions, wars and reservations and, of course, population. The atlas is a two-year, $650,000 project paid for by UO, researched by UO faculty and state personnel and produced by Allan Cartography of Medford. Like the first edition of the book in 1976, the atlas was printed by UO and edited by UO geography professor William Loy, with Stuart Allan as cartographer. It has 10 times more data than the first edition. "It's the culmination of my professional career," said Allan. "I'm used to seeing my maps out there in print, but this is something special - fantastic even, if I do say so. It's not just me; it's the chance combination of the UO departments in a position to gather all this information and for us to employ the sophisticated digital cartography that's been developed in recent years." Frohnmayer Wednesday gave personally signed copies of the atlas to Ashland, Phoenix, North and South Medford and Hidden Valley high schools. Copies will be given to libraries of all 1,200 public schools in Oregon, where they will be available to 600,000 students. They will retail in stores at $100 for hardback and $60 for softcover. Frohnmayer, a Medford native and former state attorney general, called it "the most impressive volume of information ever assembled about the state - as fact-filled as it is beautifully presented." The atlas is divided into sections on human geography, the economy, physical geography and reference maps, the latter with closeups of every square mile of the state. Many states have an atlas, said Allan, but most are "good to embarrassing, frankly, because they're usually put out by economic development departments to promote relocation and investment." The atlas was not a commercial venture, but a "badly overdue treasure trove of information" made possible "only when an angel or large agency shoulders the financial burden," said Allan. UO paid for it from the UO Foundation and discretionary funds in the UO president's office. Co-authors with Loy and Allan are professor Aileen Buckley, UO cartographer, and James Meacham, director of the InfoGraphics Lab in UO's geography department. The atlas came out late enough to include the basic 2000 Census information, but not a lot of the finer detail from it, Allan said. Otherwise, it's got everything researchers could find. "You name it, it's in there, unless we couldn't find enough data on something," Allan said. "It's even got all the mascot animals of all Oregon high schools." The 20,000 copies of the atlas are available in stores, on the Internet at www.uopress.com, by phone at 1-866-OR-ATLAS or by mail at University of Oregon Press, 5283 University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403-5283. Publishers hope to put out a CD-ROM version soon. John Darling is a free-lance writer living in Ashland. E-mail him at [email protected] . Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2001 Mail Tribune, Inc.