National Atlas of the United States

The National Atlas of the United States was an atlas published by the United States Department of the Interior from 1874 to 1997.

Older editions were printed, but the most recent edition was available online. Since it is a publication of the United States government, the atlas and its maps are in the public domain.

According to the U.S. National Atlas website, this atlas "provided a comprehensive, maplike view into the enormous wealth of geospatial and geostatistical data collected for the United States."^[1] Its purpose was also to increase "geographic knowledge and understanding and to foster national self-awareness."^[1] Information used to develop the National Atlas of the United States was also used in conjunction with Canadian and Mexican information to produce continental-scale tools such as the North American Environmental Atlas.

The online National Atlas of the United States contained thousands of printable maps, fully documented digital cartographic datasets, wall maps, Web map and features services that complied with Open Geospatial Consortium standards, wall maps, multimedia dynamic maps, and innovative mapping applications.

In late 2013, mapping managers at the U.S. Geological Survey decided to end the program despite the fact that nationalatlas.gov received three times the use of its other mapping service nationalmap.gov.^[2] The demise of the National Atlas was announced in February 2014 and nationalatlas.gov was taken offline on October 1, 2014.

Since the Atlas' retirement, its data remains available in two places:

• Data published in the National Atlas is archived as 1997-2014 Edition of The National Atlas of the United States^[3] on the U.S. government's^[4] website.
• The U.S. Geological Survey continues to make at least a subset of the National Atlas data available under its National Map Small Scale Collection.^[5] A few of the datasets have been updated since the Atlas retired.