An atlas provides more than just geographic information.
The dictionary definition of atlas as "a collection of charts or maps, kept loose or bound in a volume" doesn't do justice to the wealth of information captured in these books. Beyond the geographic features of each country, the maps in a world atlas might provide such diverse information as the climate, languages and geology of each country. The key to selecting the best world atlas is to understand what questions you want answered.
Instructions
1. Make a list of the questions that you want the information in the atlas to answer. Beyond the usual questions of geography, you might be interested in the climate, in population numbers or in the natural vegetation of an area. If you have an interest in a particular country or region of the world, then you might want detailed maps of that area. Will you need to know the latitude and longitude of a place?
2. Assemble a collection of world atlases to examine. Visit your local library or bookstore and look in the reference sections for atlases. There are also atlases available online to view.
3. Check how atlas' currency and relevancy. Look at the publication date of each atlas on the copyright page or on the website. Discard any atlases with a publication date that is 5 years old, unless you are interested in historical world information. Browse through the atlas to see if any geopolitical world change in the last two years is shown in the maps. Check the introduction to the atlas to find the date of the last update to the statistical data in the atlas.
4. Read the table of contents to see if the atlas contains maps with information that answer your questions. Some maps might contain several different types of information. For example, one map might show climate, temperature, precipitation and vegetation. Turn to each type of map and look at the key that explains what the different colors on the map represent. Check that you can distinguish the different colors on the map.
5. Look at the maps to see what scale and level of detail they give. An atlas with just a few maps cannot give the same detail as an atlas with several hundred maps. Are there enough maps that cover the regions that you are interested in? Check that the maps highlight the cities and towns that you are looking for. Make sure that you can read the text on the map. If the map spreads across several pages, make sure that no information is hidden in the bindings of the atlas.
6. Turn to the index at the back of the atlas and see how easy it is to use. If you don't know the new name of a city of country, can you look it up by its old name? Look for entries for all the kinds of information that you need. An atlas with only a few entries in the index makes it difficult for you to find the information that you need, even if it is contained somewhere in the book.
7. Investigate any extras in the atlas that could be of use or of interest to you. Photos add an extra level of detail, and, in online atlases, links to articles about the places on the maps provide further knowledge.
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