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             International Cartographic Congress '93
                          Koeln/Cologne
                        One Woman's View
 
                    By Alberta Auringer Wood
                          Map Librarian
               Memorial University of Newfoundland
                St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada
 
     This meeting was officially held from May 3 through May 9, but
it really began for me on May 1 when we walked over the Rhine River
Hohenzollern Bridge to find the Koeln Messe Congress Centrum Ost.
The conference signs were not well in evidence on that day (though
they were later), and we wandered around the vast area of buildings
before we found our way into the right spot.  Being able to ask
simple directional questions in German and understand most of the
answer did help!  This was thanks to Anke Tonn (one of our
catalogers) helping me to refresh my university German of some
thirty years ago.  At this point there was no one around to ask
where to put the exhibit of Canadian materials.  However, we went
there again on Sunday afternoon, May 2d, to rearrange some of the
maps in the Canadian portion of the International Map Exhibition,
to find out where the exhibit would go, and to learn that it would
not be possible to put it up until Monday morning.  It was put up
then and a video tape player arrived as well to indicate the
attractions of Ottawa as a venue for the 1999 meeting of ICA.
There were also brochures to be handed out.
     On Sunday night, I was asked to serve as the Chair of an Ad
Hoc Committee to select the finalists in the Barbara Bartz
Petchenik Children's Map Competition.  This was a world-wide
competition for children to prepare a world map and was in memory
of Dr. Petchenik who died last June of cancer.  She had a great
interest in mapping done by children.  The other members of the
committee were Wanarat Thothong (Thailand), Ernoe Csati (Hungary),
Corne van Elzakker (The Netherlands), and Jon Kimerling (U.S.A.).
I managed to talk to all of them by Tuesday morning about our task,
and then we met on Friday morning to come up with our list of the
ten the committee liked best.  We had been charged to try to choose
one from each continent, but no maps were submitted from Africa.
Many hundreds of maps had been submitted, but we were selecting
from 76 semi-finalists chosen by the ICA Executive.  When polling
the committee selections we found that we had listed 32 different
maps among us.  From these we eventually chose submissions from Sri
Lanka, Brazil, U.S.A., U.K., Estonia, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania,
Japan, and Indonesia as the ten finalists.  These maps will be
submitted to UNICEF as suggestions from which to choose a greeting
card.  Among the maps not making this list was a submission by the
five year old grandson of Dr. Petchenik.  At the closing ceremony
on Saturday afternoon, May 8th, I had to report on these
selections.  The maps chosen exhibited a global view, showed
imagination, creativity, and uniqueness, as well as some artistic
skill.
     On Monday, 3 May, I spent nearly the entire day at meetings of
the ICA Working Group on Gender in Cartography.  There was a
business meeting chaired by Eva Siekierska of Energy, Mines and
Resources Canada and attended by about ten or twelve women
cartographers from around the world.  The first draft of a
Directory of Women in Cartography, Surveying, and GIS was handed
out, with a request for updating and correcting, as was a diskette
with the database containing the results of the survey on women in
cartography.   The directory is to be sent to all the women who
responded to the survey request and agreed to have their names
listed.  Carol Beaver reported on her attendance at a United
Nations conference on cartography where she prepared a report for
that group based upon the results of this working group's survey.
Sweden will be sending out copies of the report which is being
supported by the Norwegian mapping agency.  The next meeting of the
group is tentatively planned for May 1994, possibly in Istanbul.
In the early afternoon, there was a workshop presented by Donna
Williams of the National Atlas Information Service, Canada, on
gender and its influences.  From 4:00 to 5:30 pm, there was on open
meeting of the working group that was attended by about 30 or more
people, including one of the ICA Vice Presidents, Michael Wood from
the U.K., who is the Executive Liaison to the committee.  It was
noted that the group is to represent women, younger cartographers
and those from developing countries.  At some point, I looked
through the list of participants and estimated that about 25% of
those listed were women.  During the open meeting a representative
from the Norwegian Society indicated that their group is about 10%
women.
     The meeting was held in conjunction with the 42nd Annual
German Cartographers' Meeting (42. Deutscher Kartographentag) and
there was a joint opening ceremony.  Welcomes were given by Norbert
Burger the Mayor of Cologne; Fraser Taylor the ICA President;
Ulrich Freitag the German society president; Frederick Wilhelm
Held, on behalf of the Government of North Rhine-Westfalia; Hugh
O'Donnell as Secretary General of the International Union of
Surveys and Mapping on behalf of the international sister
organizations; and Franz K. List, President of the German Society
of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing on behalf of the German sister
organizations.  The Mercator medal of the German Society for
Cartography was awarded to Jacques Bertin, Paris, by Ulrich
Freitag.  This award of the German society is for outstanding
achievement in cartography and was awarded for the second time.
The keynote address was given by David Rhind, Director General of
the Ordnance Survey of Great Britain, on "Mapping in the New
Millenium".  He concentrated on the European situation and gave
examples based upon the Ordnance Survey.  He noted that we must
assume that the computer is a fundamental part of what we are
doing.  He expects great expansion of cartographic activities in
Europe in the next three years.  For the long term, he felt that
there would be much wider use of GIS, especially by non-traditional
users, that there would be computer networking, and that there
would be much greater international competition, among other
things.  He somewhat gloomily concluded that cartography will
prosper, but not cartographers.
     The ICA paper sessions numbered twenty-one containing 126
papers while the German society had an additional four sessions
with eight papers.  For two of the days, there were four concurrent
sessions, and on the other three days, there were three such
sessions, so it was impossible to get to all the papers!  There
were also 37 poster presentations.  Fortunately, most of the
papers, though not all, were included in the two volume proceedings
for the congress.  The topics of the ICA sessions were:  New Tasks,
New Techniques, New Terms I and II; Navigation System, Tourism
Cartography; Mapping Statistics; Neural Nets, Cartographic
Generalization; Mass Media Cartography; Mapping Land Use;
Knowledge-based Mapping Systems; Maps for Protection and Disaster
Prevention; Map Based Information Systems I, II, III, IV, and V;
Atlas Cartography I and II; Cartography Modelling of Geographic
Information, Map Revision; Space and Map Perception and Language
Representation; Space and Map Perception, Cartographic Design;
Interactive and Educational Cartography; Marketing Cartographic
Data; Multi Media Displays and Hypermapping.  The topics of the
German society sessions were:  Topographische Kartographie;
Thematische Kartographie; Kartographie und Geoinformation; and
Berufsfeld de Kartographie.  In addition, several of the
commissions held open special meetings where their members gave
papers.
     There was an enormous international map exhibition with 40
countries represented, as well as separate ones on cartography in
Germany and in the European region.  Other special topic exhibits
were education cartography (maps by students, young scientists, and
apprentices), tactile maps, maps in advertising, and Cologne and
the Rhineland in historical maps.  An exhibition catalogue was
prepared and distributed to conference registrants.  President
Taylor appointed an ad hoc committee to chose the six "best" maps
from the international map exhibit.  One "winning" map was from
Canada, "The Circumpolar Map of Quaternary Deposits of the Arctic"
distributed by the Geological Survey of Canada and done in
cooperation with the Russians.  The other maps were a Swiss map of
Mt. Everest, a map of Soho from the U.K., a Spanish map of
Catalonya, a Norwegian map of Antarctica, and a Russian topographic
map at a scale of 1:200 000.  Exact citations available upon
request!
     At the same time as the cartographic congresses were going on,
the Koeln Messe and the Alfred-Wegener Foundation held the second
"geotechnica" or International Trade Fair and Congress for Geo-
Sciences and Technology in the Congress Centrum West.  Over 500
companies displayed their products and examples of their work and
services.  Canada and the U.S. were well represented.  Our
registration gave us access to this somewhat overwhelming and huge
exhibit hall.
     The conference was rounded out by a variety of social events,
such as receptions, an organ concert in the magnificent Cologne
cathedral, music along with opening and closing ceremonies, an
elegant banquet with delicious food, several tours of the local
area and mapping agencies, and for those who stayed till the last
day, a boat tour of the Rhine River from Bingen to Koblenz and a
walking tour of Koblenz.  Travel to Bingen and from Koblenz was by
train, very comfortable and smooth.  The weather that day was
lovely, too, though it had been mixed and somewhat cool during the
week.  Some of us got thoroughly soaked walking back across the
Hohenzollern Bridge on Saturday night when a late afternoon
thunderstorm struck with drenching rain and hail!  We enjoyed the
rest of the evening nonetheless.  It was a good conference for
visiting with old friends and making new ones, despite there not
being a central conference hotel.  We were spread all over the city
and the surrounding countryside in hotels, big and small, as well
as in bed and breakfast establishments.  The restaurant and hotel
food was generally good, though expensive, as was everything else.
People came and went from the conference by plane, train, boat,
car, and even motorcycle!