Geographic and GIS Resources

Frank Donnelly, Geospatial Librarian     


Geography is the study of the earth that includes both the physical and human environment. For geographers, the focus of study is place, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are tools that can be used to study and analyze places in order to understand the spatial aspect of phenomena (in other words, to understand how objects or events are distributed across different locations and how they interact). GIS software is essentially like a geographical database package, where data exists not only as a series of tables, but also visually in the form of map layers. GIS can be used to produce maps, perform geographical analysis, and create new data. Geographic Information Science is the study of both the theoretical and practical aspects of GIS. This brief guide provides links to useful resources for learning about GIS and for obtaining geospatial and tabular data in a format that can be used in GIS.

Learning About GIS   GIS Software   GIS Data   Tabular Data   Address and Point Data  

Learning About GIS

  As part of the university's license agreement with ESRI, the makers of ArcGIS, current Baruch students, faculty, and staff are eligible to register for a number of online, self-paced, free GIS courses. Visit the Virtual Campus Courses at Baruch page for more information on registration requirements, procedures, and a list of available courses. If you have any GIS questions, contact Frank Donnelly, the Library's Geospatial Librarian, at Francis_Donnelly@baruch.cuny.edu

   A few general resources that discuss what GIS is:

  • USGS GIS Poster - The United States Geological Survey is one of the primary federal mapping agencies in the US.
  • ESRI - What Is GIS? - ESRI is the largest commercial producer of GIS software, ArcGIS.
  • GIS Dictionary - Created by ESRI, this is a comprehensive dictionary with concise entries for GIS terminology.
  • ArcGIS Web-based Help - The online documentation for ESRI's ArcGIS software. Good for learning the software, troubleshooting problems, and getting basic info on particular GIS topics such as geodatabases, map projections, and address matching (just to name a few).
  • CSISS GIS Cookbook - The Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science has assembled a series of tutorials and instructions for performing basic ArcGIS operations, such as how to open a map, add data, join tables, create classifications, work with projections, etc. Tutorials exist for ArcView 3.x and ArcGIS 8.x and 9.x.
  • CUNY Union Catalog - Search the library catalog for textbooks, tutorials, and topical books on mapping and GIS. Baruch has recently added several new titles to our collection.

GIS Software at Baruch

Baruch College uses ESRI's ArcGIS Desktop 9.2 software, which is available to students in several locations on campus, including the south side of the BCTC lab (to the right of the turnstyle at the back of the room) on the 6th floor of the library building and four labs / classrooms on the 6th floor of the Vertical Campus: 6-145, 6-150, 6-155, and 6-165. Graduate students can also use ArcGIS on the library's graduate student workstations on the 3rd, 4th, and 5th floors of the library. If you want to experiment with GIS off campus, try downloading one of these free programs. The functionality will be more limited than ArcGIS but will allow you to view GIS layers, make maps, and perform some basic geoprocessing operations.

  • ArcExplorer - a free, proprietary data viewer from ESRI, the producers of ArcGIS.
  • ProViewer - a free, proprietary data viewer from MapInfo, one of ESRI's chief commercial competitors.
  • QGIS - a free, open source GIS program.
  • Map Window - another free, open source GIS program.
  • List of GIS software - Wikipedia's list of GIS software applications.

GIS Data

GIS data, in the form of vector data features - points, lines, and polygons (areas), and raster data such as aerial photography, satellite imagery, and scanned digital maps, is widely available on the web for download. Here are a few common resources, sorted by level of geography. Remember that data for a small area may be available by searching the resources for a large area. For example, census boundaries for New York City are available from the NYC Planning Department, but are also available from the Census Bureau, a national-level resource. If you are looking for resources for a particular state, province, or country, try searching through the web pages of the government agencies for those areas, as they are the most likely source. Colleges and Universities also tend to compile and publish data for their local area. Freely available GIS data for countries besides the US can be difficult to find, and often requires that you can read the native language of the particular country you are looking for. Try searching the web pages for various national mapping agencies.

All map layers must share the same projection or coordinate system in order to function together in GIS. If you are downloading and using GIS layers from several different sources, you will probably need to reproject some of the layers using your GIS software package. This page from the University of Nebraska briefly summarizes what projection and coordinate systems are. If you are mapping local data, the two most common systems are State Plane and UTM (Universal Transverse Mercator). WGS84 is also fairly common, as it is the default projection for most GPS units.

World

United States

State of New York

  • NYS GIS Clearinghouse - a state government depository that compiles GIS data produced at the state, county, and local levels for New York State.
  • NYS GIS - Digital Orthoimagery Direct - the NYS GIS page for imagery (orthophotos), tiles can be searched by county and year. Imagery for the five boroughs for the most current series (2000 - 2006) is only available by direct, special request. Imagery from the older series (1994-1999) is available for all areas.
  • CUGIR - Cornell University's Geospatial Information Repository. They also compile data at the state, county, and local levels for NY State and they coordinate their activities with NYS GIS.
  • New York State Museum - geologic, watershed, and boundary files for NY State.

State of New Jersey

  • New Jersey Geographic Information Network - a clearinghouse for data produced at the state, county, and local level. The site includes interactive mapping, files for download, and a list of off-line resources.
  • NJ Image Warehouse - The NJGIN page for imagery (orthophotos) downloadable by county or municipality, and by year (2002 or 1995).
  • NJDEP GIS - Digital Data - the New Jersey Dept of Environmental Protection provides boundary files and features (environmental and administrative) at the state, county, and watershed levels.

New York City

  • BYTES of the BIG APPLE - the NYC Department of City Planning's page has administrative and political boundaries, streets, transportation networks, shorelines, and tax parcels.
  • DoITT - Services: GIS - the NYC Department of Information Technologies and Telecommunications has transportation networks, survey points, water bodies, building footprints, and open spaces.

Tabular Data

Using GIS, you can take tabular data (in text files, spreadsheets, or database file formats) for a particular area and join that data table to a GIS boundary file, based on a common field that they share (such as an ID number), in order to map the data. Here are a few common resources for demographic tabular datasets:

  • United Nations Environment Programme - GEO Data Portal - In addition to geospatial data, the UNEP has a large selection of tabular datasets.
  • US Census Bureau International Data Base - the Census Bureau compiles some basic population data for each country in the world. Select the spreadsheet option, and under "Stub Translation," make sure to accept some coded information in the spreadsheet so that the code can be used to join the table to the GIS feature.
  • American FactFinder - The US Census Bureau's site for accessing their datasets, including the decennial census (1990 and 2000), the Economic Census, the American Community Survey, population estimates and projections, and more.
  • Infoshare Online - a non-profit corporation has built this site that pulls together a wealth of datasets for New York City at a variety of geographic levels: city, borough, zip code, neighborhood, census geography, and more. Datasets include the census, economic census, health and welfare, education, and land use.
  • NYC Department of City Planning Reference - has many reference sources and features, including an address locator, district and community profiles, census reports, an online census viewer, land use information, transportation planning, and more. Most of the data and maps on this site are in pdf format (and thus are not readily compatible with GIS).
  • Baruch College Library databases - USA Trade Online and WDI: World Development Indicators are two databases that contain socio-economic data for countries throughout the world. The Neighborhood Change database contains normalized US Census tract data from 1970 to 2000. Only available to current members of the Baruch academic community.

Address and Point Data

In addition to joining tables to geographic features to map data, you can also take tables of point data and turn them into geographic features using GIS. If you have a list of features with coordinates (latitude and longitude or decimal degrees), you can use the Import XY Data command to map these points. If you have a list of addresses and a street network feature that has addresses assigned to it, you can use a process called geocoding, or address matching, to match these addresses to the street network and create a new layer of points.

  • Map Coordinates Finder - enter an address, city, state, or zip code, and you will get a map centered on the area and the latitude and longitude coordinates for that point (if you map an area, the coordinates will represent the centroid, or center point, of that area). This is part of batchgeocode.com's website - if you go to their homepage, you can interactively match a list of addresses that you have (instead of using a GIS software package).
  • Reference USA - Baruch subscribes to this database directory of businesses. You can search for businesses by company name, city and state, or NAICS code and generate a csv file (which you can open in a spreadsheet like Excel) with longitude, latitude and other attribute information for businesses, such as sales and number of employees. You can then plot these locations in ArcGIS by using the Import XY data command to create a map.
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