After a century and a half of customer service, an organization like Bartholomew Cartographic has seen it all. From its inception, the company has used the most technologically advanced tools to create its paper maps and atlases, which in 1833 merely consisted of the finest ink and pens available.

Today's tools are a little different. At Bartholomew, a part of HarperCollins Publishers (HC), GIS has taken over the role of pen, paper, and mapmaking tool.

Using ArcInfo in conjunction with Maplex annotation software, Bartholomew is driving down costs and improving its methods for producing the highest possible quality maps and atlases.

Combining traditional mapmaking methods with advanced digitizing, editing, and graphical display techniques, Bartholomew is not simply reaping these immediate benefits; it is also using GIS to create new and innovative data offerings, expanding its overall product line.

"We have used GIS to increase throughput and to lower the cost of map production," says Alex Elder, cartographic director. "Equally important, we now have a more creative and flexible range of products. We can use GIS to target specific needs and produce solutions based on those needs. We have now entered new markets that weren't accessible to us previously."

One of the largest publishers of books, encyclopedias, maps, atlases, dictionaries, and more, HarperCollins is a wholly owned subsidiary of the News Corporation, a global media company whose diversified operations include Twentieth Century Fox and more than 128 newspapers and other media interests worldwide.

Bartholomew provides cartographic production service to HarperCollins Publishers and was formed in 1992 by the amalgamation of the Bartholomew and Collins cartographic operations. HarperCollins maintains three locations in the United Kingdom with the bulk of map production done at its Glasgow and Cheltenham offices.

With more than 80 employees dedicated to continual mapping duties, Bartholomew is a leading provider of map products to publishers and commercial organizations throughout the world.

"The Cartographic Division is justifiably proud of their products, which include the brand-leading Times and Collins range of world reference and thematic atlases and the Bartholomew and Collins series of world maps, road atlases, road maps, holiday and leisure maps, and city and town plans," says Elder.

In addition to all of these products, HC also has been actively involved in providing digital map products, following computing trends that have swept around the globe in the last two decades.

As HC sees it, the overall migration toward digitally available products was a strategic decision necessary for maintaining its industry advantage.

"A substantial capital investment in the business was required to achieve this type of advantage," Elder explains. "Investing in new technology to improve work flow also had other implications. We had to seek new business opportunities and generate additional revenue and cash flow."

And seek they did. After researching available technology solutions, HC opted to acquire GIS to automate how they produced maps, but the impact of the software went beyond simple mapmaking.

The company acquired ArcInfo software. The software is used for advanced cartography and high-quality output. With ArcInfo, HC can automate, store, edit, and manage all of their spatial data using one solution.

According to HC, the software's database-driven cartography coupled with its advanced mapmaking tools, from initial layout to final output, gives the company a key advantage to meet business objectives.

"You want your database to be as flexible as you can possibly make it in terms of what features are contained, how features can be symbolized, and more," says Elder. "The secret is in having all that data there, and also being able to quickly and easily select, classify, and extract only the data that you want for any particular scale of map or even a particular theme of map. Using ArcInfo and Maplex, we are able to do that and the benefits are immediate. We are saving a lot of time, and time is money."

Previous manual methods involved 30 to 40 draftspersons working full time to draw maps. Now, HC employs 15 to 20 people who work with GIS, doing the same work faster and with greater efficiency.

As vital as ArcInfo is to the overall automation of the mapmaking process, the use of Maplex is giving HC a powerful solution to one of its primary needs, text placement-a time-consuming and laborious process that used to make HC officials cringe at the thought.

"Maplex allows us to set up a rule table that defines how each feature in the database is to be symbolized for a particular product and takes into consideration how symbolized features react to each other when placed on maps," says Elder. "The software allows us to avoid these things clashing into each other."

Text placement, once a tedious manual process that took a great deal of manpower, is now an automated process that, according to Elder, is 90 percent faster using Maplex. The software configuration consists of ArcInfo Version 7.x, Maplex Version 3.1, Adobe Illustrator Version 6.0.2, and QuarkXpress Version 3.3.2.

For the overall map production, hardware includes a Sun server, Sun SPARC workstations, Apple Power PCs, other PCs, CalComp and Novajet electrostatic plotters, and Agfa Accuset Imagesetter.

With the acquisition of GIS came the automation of mapmaking and also the automation of the end product itself. Digital or electronic map data are made available on CD-ROM and via the Web.

Possible future offerings to be made available include ESRI's ArcView Internet Map Server and MapObjects Internet Map Server software. "We found that the market was demanding data and electronic products from us in addition to paper-based mapping," says Elder.

In fact, the new digital database at HC has facilitated more than 200 new products available today, with incremental revenue from the new products approaching £ 2 million (U.S. $3.265 million).

Data products include digital maps of the world, Great Britain, Europe, London, and more, with coverages of administrative boundaries, lakes and other bodies of water, topography, urban areas, roads, national and regional parks, rail and ferry locations, and much more.

"Digital or electronic data provide a means for exploiting these new business opportunities," says Elder. "These include data licensing, electronic publishing, and online access to geographical information."

With the success of the company's GIS-driven new products, HC is continuing to evolve its product line and sales resources. In addition to working on Internet GIS product offerings, HC is coordinating with other mapping companies to license its data. As HC sees it, it is a win-win situation.

"We are talking to many cartographic companies in the world in terms of what they have and what we have and how we can share and benefit from each other's work," explains Elder. "There is no reason why these companies can't benefit from the work we have already done rather than starting from scratch incurring a substantial cost in data capture and maintenance."

"What this technology has done is to sustain existing revenue streams, achieve lower production costs, increase product throughput with less staff, and open up new revenue streams," says Elder. "GIS is giving us a means for continually growing and evolving our business, and that is vital to serving our customers."

For more information, contact Alex Elder (fax: 44-141-306-3144, E-mail: alex.elder@bartholomew.co.uk) or explore the Collins Bartholomew Web site at www.bartholomewmaps.com to view and download data and digital products.