Multimedia Atlas Concepts

The term “atlas” was originally the name of the giant in Greek mythology who held the sky on his shoulders. The German cartographer Mercator (Gerhard Krämer, 1512 – 1594) used the term for a collection of maps published in 1595. From this point on the term was used to refer to “a collection of maps, systematically selected and arranged on uniform paper size using standard map layout and uniform design, generally in bound (book) form” (Freitag 1991, p. 21). Today the term is also used for a collection of maps on other media.