One of the first projects the fledging Canadian government undertook after Confederation -- printing and storing topographic maps of the country -- may become the victim of cost-cutting, a possibility that has prompted howls of outrage from map librarians and retailers.
The government isn't preparing to get out of the cartography business entirely, but it plans to put its topographic map data on the Internet where companies and individuals would be able to access the information, either free or for a fee, and then print it or pay a professional printer to do it.
"We're really at risk of losing a real national treasure," warns Brad Green, president of World of Maps Inc., in Ottawa.
"I hope it's not an irreversible decision. Some people will accept this is the digital age and they will roll over," he said.
But not Mr. Green. He is spearheading a letter-writing campaign to persuade the bureaucrats to change their minds about topographic maps. (Nautical maps, produced by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, are not affected by the change.)
Is the digital revolution making old-fashioned paper maps obsolete or is this just another Luddite-style worry among the kind of folk who also think computers are preventing children from learning how to print?
John Dawson, acting director of Natural Resources Canada's Centre for Topographic Information, figures that people are upset about the proposal because it is the latest in a series of changes to the map-making business that depart from the philosophy of the original craftsmen who treated cartography and map reading as an art.
But Mr. Dawson says the change is also about the bottom line. "Is there a better way to do this business? We know there is a better way."
About 1.5 million maps are now in storage.
But Ottawa plans to close the map warehouse, which costs $191,000 a year, in January, 2007, when the lease expires. The government is trying to find a way to better use that money and the warehouse space, Mr. Dawson said. Ottawa is also trying to figure out what it will do with all those maps.
It may also get out of the business of printing topographic maps. To make printing economical, there is a press run of at least 1,000 copies of each map sheet. The government can also print small orders by "plotting on demand."
The Natural Resources Department is supposed to maintain the business on a break-even basis. But now it wants to reallocate its funding to focus on data collection and update its maps as they are placed on the Internet, Mr. Dawson said.
He said topographic distribution has been sliding over the past few years as people have moved to digital files or sought out more up-to-date maps. In the fiscal year that ended March 31, 2003, Canada distributed about 330,000 topographic maps. Over the next year, that dropped to 261,000 and in the most recent year, only 2,008 maps left the warehouse, he said. Some people worry that without a warehouse of ready-made maps, emergency services would not be able to react quickly to natural disasters such as ice storms, floods and earthquakes. But Mr. Dawson said Ottawa could quickly plot and print maps in times of disaster.
Others say paper maps are valuable tools to teach students about Canada's cartographic and geographic heritage.
Mr. Green's World of Maps store is one of the country's 11 regional distribution centres, which sell government-produced maps to the public and retailers. He worries that if those maps go digital, the private sector will be left to produce poor-quality maps at unregulated prices. Government maps sell at a suggested retail price of $11.45.
Donna Nelson, co-owner of Gem Trek Publishing in Cochrane, Alta., just west of Calgary, understands the issues of cost. Her company designs topographic maps of popular recreational areas in Alberta and British Columbia, but it contracts out the printing, at press runs of about 3,000, to keep the business financially viable.
There's no reason, she said, that another commercial printer would not step in if Ottawa changed the way it delivers map information. "Historically, their role is to make the data available to the public," Ms. Nelson said, "but not necessarily in the printed form."
A similar proposal by the U.S. government in 1990 to stop producing paper maps was met with "gasps of horror and stunned silence" from map librarians at a meeting in Washington, according to April Carlucci, who was then assistant chief of the map division at the New York Public Library.
When the U.S. government maps arrived in digital format, she recalled, librarians didn't know what to do with them and didn't have the equipment to display them.
Now, 15 years later, U.S. officials have started consulting map librarians about what they need in terms of government maps. The first response at a recent meeting ("I like paper!") received a round of applause, according to Ms. Carlucci, now cataloguing manager and curator of modern maps with the British Library.
That, she said, was a "development of major importance" in the bid to see the return of U.S. government paper maps.
CORRECTION
Canada distributed about 208,000 topographic maps in the year ending March 31, 2005. An incorrect figure provided by Natural Resources Canada appeared yesterday.