GIS Data and Mapping Tools
Resources
The websites below offer valuable resources for discovering GIS data and tools.
IHGIS is a project of the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) data service at the University of Minnesota. It provides data tables from population and housing censuses as well as agricultural censuses from around the world, with corresponding GIS boundary files.
NHGIS is a project of the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) data service at the University of Minnesota. It provides summary tables and time series of population, housing, agriculture, and economic data, along with GIS-compatible mapping files, from 1790 through the present and for all levels of U.S. census geography, including states, counties, tracts, and blocks.
The BTAA-GIN is a collaboration of library-affiliated staff from Big Ten Academic Alliance universities. It supports geospatial research, fosters connections among library profession
This application created by Tim Waters is a georeferencing or georectification service for warping or stretching images or historical maps to fit them on real world map coordinates. It is written in Ruby and Rails and customised with the OpenStreetMap project in mind, and is all open source. Libraries and other institutions have used it, including the New York Public Library, Harvard, Stanford Universities, Leiden Archives (in The Netherlands), The DOE/NEPA (US Federal Government) and Wikimedia Commons.
This collection was started over 35 years ago and contains more than 200,000 maps. The collection focuses on 16th through 21st century maps of North and South America, as well as maps of the World, Asia, Africa, Europe, and Oceania. The site now has of 141,000 items online, with new additions added regularly. The site is free and open to the public and includes a variety of tools that allow users to compare, analyze, and view items in new and experimental ways.