"Resources and environment. World Atlas. A Russian world atlas edited and published in Austria.

At the end of 1998, the Austrian cartographic publishing firm Ed. Holzel pu blished the "Resources and Environment. World Atlas". This thematic world a tlas in English in two volumes (format: 35 cm x 49 cm) with 190 plates of m aps (scale mainly 1:60,000,000) and satellite images plus a commentary comp rising 12 pages on the one hand presents the natural resources with respect to their actual and potential uses, and impacts of mankind and human activ ities on the environment on the other hand. Thus this atlas provides a comp arative global survey of resources and the environmental situation of so fa r unchallenged completeness and complexity. It also is the most substantial thematic world atlas ever published in Austria. The atlas manuscripts were drawn up at the Russian Academy of Sciences (for merly Soviet Academy of Sciences), with contributions from many other scien tific institutions in the Russian Federation as well as in other parts of t he former Soviet Union. For the publishing firm Ed. Holzel, the Austrian In stitute of East and Southeast European Studies in Vienna carried out the th ematic and cartographic editing of the manuscripts and organized and superv ised the technical processing by means of EDP techniques by the Slovak ente rprise Sfera a.s. in Bratislava. A scientific world atlas poses specific challenges to marketing. Since the market is limited and established distribution channels are not available, the atlas is in higher price brackets and potential buyers are scattered ov er the globe, direct marketing based on specific address lists for academia appears best. Libraries and university institutes in all fields of geoscie nces are among the most important clientele. For the publishing house, not only selling the atlas as such, but also its utilization for didactic purpo ses and other scientific products was an incentive to tackle this project.