For those of you who visit courses and do presentations on finding neighborhood data, I’ve just updated my handout “Finding NYC Neighborhood Census Data“. It summarizes the types of geographies, datasets, and resources that are available for finding neighborhood-level census data. The primary change was that I added a new resource called the NYC Factfinder; this is a web-map application produced by the Dept of City Planning that lets users get basic census profiles for census tracts and neighborhood tabulation areas (NTAs). They’ve added a new feature where you can also build your own neighborhood profiles by selecting census tracts. For additional info about the NYC Factfinder you can read this post.
The handout is embedded in key places in the Lib Guides – in the NYC Data (on the Neighborhoods tab) and in the US Census guide. I also updated my American Factfinder tutorial last spring, and it’s also embedded in these guides. Each tutorial has its own box, so if you wanted to embed either one feel free (the boxes are named Finding NYC Neighborhood Census Data and American Factfinder respectively). It’s better to link rather than copy, as I update the tutorials every year or so.
My team is currently working on two new tutorials that are in a similar vein to the American Factfinder tutorial: one for the new NYC Factfinder and another for the Social Explorer. We should have them ready in about a month. I’ll be updating the NYC neighborhood handout again in the spring, once the latest American Community Survey data for 2014 is released at the end of this year. The Census Bureau is dropping the 3-year ACS estimates with the 2014 release, so we’ll just have a choice between 1-year and 5-year estimates. At that point I’ll remove any reference to the 3-year numbers.