LibGuides: GEOG 341: GIS for Social Scientists: GIS databases

Newsletter of Interest: How to Read this Chart

WaPo: How to Read this Chart
A weekly dive into the data behind the news. Each Saturday, national correspondent Philip Bump makes and breaks down charts explaining the latest in economics, pop culture, politics and more.

Other guides to GIS data

MIT Libraries GIS Guide
Pay attention to their blurbs about the data sources as some may only be accessible to students at that institution.
Michigan State University Libraries GIS Guide
Pay attention to their blurbs about the data sources as some may only be accessible to students at that institution.
Brown University Library GIS Guide
Pay attention to their blurbs about the data sources as some may only be accessible to students at that institution.
Cornell University Guides to Geography, Maps & Spatial Data
Pay attention to their blurbs about the data sources as some may only be accessible to students at that institution.
Business & Big Data (CMU)
A wealth of links to freely-accessible big data datasets.
Population Studies (CMU)
Basic concepts of population studies in international context. Demographic trends including fertility, mortality and migration, as well as the causes and consequences of those trends.

GIS databases

MIT GeoWeb
Not all data will be available for non-MIT users.

MIT GIS Services maintains an international collection of GIS datasets covering a variety of information types, including:
US and foreign census data
Elevation
Transportation
Hydrography (water)
Administrative boundaries
Building outlines
Parcel/tax lot boundaries with detailed assessor property data
Land use/ land cover
Demographics
Aerial photography
Big Ten Academic Alliance GeoPortal
"The Big Ten Academic Alliance Geoportal provides discoverability and facilitates access to geospatial resources. The resources in the portal are selected and curated by librarians and geospatial specialists at twelve research institutions in the Big Ten Academic Alliance.
The resources include GIS datasets, web services, and digitized historical maps."
ArcGIS Data and Maps
A database of open GIS datasets provided by ESRI, primarily on a global scale.
Google Dataset Search
Use Google to search for datasets without other results getting in the way.
Harvard Dataverse
A searchable database of researcher uploaded content. It is not exclusively GIS data but does have GIS datasets. This is an open forum and not all data is reviewed for credibility.
AmeriGEO
A global data hub related to the Global Earth Observation System of Systems initiatives.
Geolode
A directory of websites with GIS data from around the world. Maintained by the GIS Librarian at Cornell University.
Free GIS Data
A large collection of links to free GIS data. Please head the warning regarding the verification of sources. It's best with any information source, GIS data or otherwise.
GeoData at Tufts
"GeoData@Tufts is developed and maintained by Tufts University Information Technology. Tufts is leading the development in collaboration with Harvard of this open source, federated web application to rapidly discover, preview, and retrieve geospatial data from multiple repositories...GeoData@Tufts is part of The Open Geoportal. The Open Geoportal is a consortium comprised of contributions of several universities and organizations to help facilitate the discovery and acquisition of geospatial data across many organizations and platforms."
ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World
ESRI's catalog of data. Can be accessed from within ArcGIS Pro (Map Ribbon - Layer Panel - Add Data - Living Atlas) and ArcGIS Online.