On the Waterfront

THE "COLLEGE ON THE HILL" HAS always been better described as the College on the river, and if visiting scholar Barry Lawson '64 and professor emeritus George Demko of the geography department have their way, Dartmouth's place on the Connecticut River will soon become even more prominent.

Seeded by a grant from the Connecticut River Joint Commissions (CRJC), a federally sponsored nonprofit charged with the protection and preservation of the Connecticut River watershed in New Hampshire and Vermont, Lawson and Demko plan to produce an interactive atlas of the culture, history, geography and ecology of the Upper Connecticut River Watershed, the 7,000 square miles of Vermont and New Hampshire drained by New England's largest river.

"The atlas will come in two formats," says Lawson, "traditional print and interactive digital, accessed via a Web site and CD-ROMs, maybe DVDs. The book will be 9-by-12, a size that we think best matches the dimensions of a computer screen. We want the atlas to be both comprehensive and updatable, so the digital format is imperative. But we also want it to be affordable and available to schools and other entities with limited access to computers and the Internet."

The atlas as envisaged by Lawson, Demko and Sharon Francis, executive director of the CRJC, will go far beyond maps. Chapters on climate, history, socioeconomic development, wildlife, transportation and other topics will each begin with an essay written by a different author and will, in the digitized form, allow users to register at varying levels of expertise so they can update, amend and correct the many maps, charts and tables that will fill out the expected 100 to 110 pages of the atlas.

The project began several years ago when Francis began fielding telephone calls from students in an environmental studies class asking for background information on the river. "We should do something with Dartmouth's resources," she thought. A few phone calls led her to Lawson and Demko and, armed with CRJC's funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the project was conceived.

"The project is well on its way," says Francis, "but we're still raising money and recruiting information."

"We'll need $200,000 to $400,000 to finish the project," says Lawson. "There are standard ways to get that, of course-advertising and commercial listings for businesses in the watershed are obvious sources—but the first edition will be pretty pure. We'll want first to make it accurate and complete."

So far Lawson, Francis and Demko have kept their ambitious project on track. Look for it sometime next year.