New Collins Road Atlases

It's that time of year again when here at Collins we can take a moment to pat ourselves on the back, as the new editions of the Collins Road Atlases have made it out the door on time, and should now be on bookshelves up and down the land. (Although hopefully not for too long!)



One of my roles here at Collins is to produce and update the little microsite we have to show off the new range, see :

http://www.collinsroadatlases.co.uk/



But that comes right at the end of months of preparation, information gathering and editorial work that all goes in to producing the country's favourite road atlas.

The whole process is akin to the trusty Forth Road Bridge analogy - no sooner have the 2010 editions hit the shops, than its time to think about the 2011 editions.

The information gathering process involves contacting hundreds of councils across Great Britain, as well as the Highways Agency, Scottish Office and Welsh Office. This enables us to find out the latest information on proposed new road schemes, as well as those already under construction.

Rather than just write to councils with a generic letter, we try to do as much of the grunt work as possible. To this end we have a database of proposed road schemes, populated with the latest information we have collected from previous years. This enables us to produce tailored questionnaires for each council, specifically targeting the schemes which we believe may affect the next edition of the atlas. The theory - which mostly works in practice! - is that it will make it as straightforward as possible for councils to reply.

We also collect and process numerous press clippings throughout the year, as well as check out any queries or corrections that have been sent in to us by members of the public.

When new roads are completed we have a surveying team who then go out and drive along the new route with some GPS kit on board. This records the alignment of the road, and can be merged with our graphic database at a later date.

Although roads are the main thing we need to make sure we have up-to-date, we also check and revise hundreds of places of interest, tourist information centres, ferry routes, airports, motorway services etc. We do this by a combination of internet research and contacting organisations / companies directly.

Once the information has been collated, it is passed to the editorial team, who make the relevant changes to the graphic database, which, along with some DTP, is used to create the finished mapping and atlases. Which for purposes of brevity sounds straightforward, but the amount of work that the editors put in is not to be underestimated!

From there, they get dispatched to the printers, before the finished product appears in the shops.

And so that's where we came in - the new editions raring to fly off the shelves once more, and ready to have their own little website to promote them.

Did I mention the URL? Its www.collinsroadatlases.co.uk