The Water Resources Center Archives (WRCA) on the UC Berkeley campus recently announced the digitization of the California Water Atlas (1979). The atlas was ahead of it’s time in regards to visual representation of mapping and data, and its content is crucially relevant today. WRCA worked closely with David Rumsey and his state-of-the-art scanning facilities and powerful online map-viewing tools.
High resolution images of each page, as well as various resolution PDFs of the entire atlas, are available online from Mr. Rumsey’s Historical Map Collection web site at:
http://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/view/search?q=5788
An online flip-book and other electronic versions (e.g., Kindle) are also available from the Internet Archive at:
http://www.archive.org/details/The_California_Water_Atlas
A Creative Commons license 3.0 was identified as fitting with OPR’s authorization
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/).
Mr. Rumsey shared interest and was involved in this project. Here is a link to his blog post announcing the digitization of the atlas:
http://www.davidrumsey.com/blog/2010/1/21/landmark-1979-california-water-atlas-debuts-online