Lafayette College Library

Launched by the Federal Geographic Data Committee, the Geospatial Platform provides access to federally maintained and trusted geospatial data, services, and applications for sharing and use.

Create and save maps illustrating 168 indicators on the food environment covering food choices, health and well-being, and community characteristics in U.S. states or counties. Indicators include store/restaurant proximity, food prices, and food and nutrition assistance programs. Data is drawn from numerous sources including the Decennial Census, County Business Patterns, and Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System.

Create and save maps illustrating over 60 socioeconomic indicators on people, jobs, agriculture and other county data. Sources include the American Community Survey, economic reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the latest Census of Agriculture. You may also download your data into a spreadsheet for use in Excel or other statistical software.

"Presents in maps and text complete data about the creation and all subsequent changes (dated to the day) in the size, shape, and location of every county in the fifty United States and the District of Columbia." Available as interactive maps and shapefiles that can be downloaded for use with GIS software.

Resources for integrating GIS into the social sciences. Includes materials on methods, tools, techniques, software, data access, and more.

A center within Columbia University's Earth Institute, CIESIN provides an extensive gateway to data and other information focusing on human interactions in the environment.  Provides a topic search as well as subject access to spatial and tabular data sets held by CIESIN or hosted on its web site. 

Contains data from the 1790-1960 US Housing and Population censuses. Browse by state or county by topic, produce tables, and/or create ratios. Also includes "Map it" feature which generates interactive maps at the national, state or county levels.

From GeoLytics, the NCDB offers normalized Census Tract data from 1970 - 2000 for all urban areas of the country. One can generate custom reports and maps within the NCDB. Files are easily imported into GIS software or other statistical packages for analysis. Note: At present, this resource may only be accessed using Internet Explorer.

From the EPA, map various types of environmental information, including air releases, drinking water, toxic releases, hazardous wastes, water discharge permits and Superfund sites. See also TOXMAP, from the National Library of Medicine.

From the US Census Bureau, this site offers current data on people, housing, business and government in tabular form (importable to GIS or statistical software) or as ready-made thematic maps. Sources include the American Community Survey, the Decennial Census of Population and Housing, and the Economic Census.