Reference at Newman Library

Author: fdonnelly

GIS Workshop Registration for Fall 2018 is now Open

Registration is now open for the fall semester’s GIS (geographic information systems) Practicum, Introduction to GIS Using Open Source Software (featuring QGIS). There will be two sessions this term, held in the GIS Lab at Baruch College:

  • Friday October 26th
  • Friday November 16th

The day-long workshop runs from 9am to 4:30pm. Current CUNY graduate students, faculty, and staff, and full-time Baruch undergrads are eligible to register. Advance registration is required; the fee is $30 and includes a detailed tutorial manual and a light breakfast. Participants must bring their own laptop with QGIS 2.18 pre-installed in order to take the class. Visit the GIS Practicum page to learn more and to register:

http://guides.newman.baruch.cuny.edu/gis/gisprac

Baruch librarians: feel free to circulate this info to students and faculty, but please do not post on listservs.

GIS Workshop Registration for Spring 2017 Is Now Open

Registration is now open for the spring semester’s GIS (geographic information systems) Practicum, Introduction to GIS Using Open Source Software (featuring QGIS). There will only be one session this term, held in the GIS Lab at Baruch College:

  • Friday Mar 10th

The day-long workshop runs from 9am to 4:30pm. Current CUNY graduate students, faculty, and staff, and full-time Baruch undergrads are eligible to register. Advance registration is required; the fee is $30 and includes a detailed tutorial manual and a light breakfast. Participants must bring their own laptop with QGIS pre-installed in order to take the class. Visit the GIS Practicum page to learn more and to register: http://guides.newman.baruch.cuny.edu/gis/gisprac.

Baruch librarians: feel free to circulate this info to students and faculty, but please do not post on listservs.

GIS Workshop Registration for Fall 2016 Is Now Open

Registration is now open for the fall semester’s GIS (geographic information systems) Practicum, Introduction to GIS Using Open Source Software (featuring QGIS). The sessions will be held in the GIS Lab at Baruch College:

  • Friday Sept 30th
  • Friday Oct 28th
  • Friday Nov 18th

The day-long workshop runs from 9am to 4:30pm. Current CUNY graduate students, faculty, and staff, and full-time Baruch undergrads are eligible to register. Advance registration is required; the fee is $30 and includes a detailed tutorial manual and a light breakfast. Participants must bring their own laptop with QGIS pre-installed in order to take the class. Visit the GIS Practicum page to learn more and to register: http://guides.newman.baruch.cuny.edu/gis/gisprac.

Baruch librarians: feel free to circulate this info to students and faculty, but please do not post on listservs.

GIS Workshop Registration for Spring 2016 Is Now Open

Registration is now open for the spring semester’s GIS (geographic information systems) Practicum, Introduction to GIS Using Open Source Software (featuring QGIS). The March workshop will be held at the Department of Earth, Environmental, and Geospatial Sciences at Lehman College in the Bronx (20 seats, PCs provided). The April session will be held at Baruch in the GIS Lab (10 seats, participants must bring laptops).

  • Friday Mar 4th
  • Friday Apr 1st

The day-long workshop runs from 9am to 4:30pm. Current CUNY graduate students, faculty, and staff, and full-time Baruch and Lehman undergrads are eligible to register. Advance registration is required; the fee is $30 and includes a detailed tutorial manual and a light breakfast. Visit the GIS Practicum page to learn more and to register: http://guides.newman.baruch.cuny.edu/gis/gisprac.

This semester we’re also bringing back the Spatial Databases workshop (featuring Spatialite). The half-day workshop will run from 9am to 12:30pm on Friday April 8th at Lehman College. Eligibility requirements are the same, except that participants must also have prior GIS experience as this is a more advanced workshop. The registration fee is $5. Visit the Spatial Database Practicum page to learn more and to register: http://guides.newman.baruch.cuny.edu/gis/spatialdb.

New Tutorials for Census Data

My team in the GIS Lab has just finished writing two new tutorials to help students and faculty find neighborhood census data. The tutorials are in a PDF format and can be used either for hands-on exercises in class or as handouts for self-directed learning.

1. Anastasia has written a tutorial on using the City’s NYC Census Factfinder. She demonstrates how to look up current census profiles for neighborhood tabulation areas and census tracts, and how to combine census tracts to create profiles for user-generated neighborhoods.

2. Janine has written a tutorial for the Social Explorer database. She demonstrates how to navigate the interface, make good looking maps, and how to download data tables for census geographies or user-generated geographies (also built by using census tracts).

These tutorials as well as others previously mentioned (on finding NYC Census data and on using the American Factfinder) are hosted in two places. I’ve created individual boxes for each one on a new Tutorials tab in the NYC Data Guide here: http://guides.newman.baruch.cuny.edu/nyc_data/tutorials. Since each tutorial is in its own box, you can easily embed the ones you want in your own guides. The PDF files themselves are stored on the Baruch Geoportal’s server, and can also be accessed centrally from there.

UK Census and US Election Data in the Social Explorer

The Social Explorer has recently added some new datasets. US Demography is still their primary module, which includes historical and current US Census data from the decennial census and the American Community Survey. But if you were looking for UK Census data, you’re now in luck! The United Kingdom 2011 Census is available for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The UK module works the same way as the US one; you can make good-looking web maps using a variety of different geographies, and download census reports.

UK Census Data

Just in time for the upcoming 2016 election, they’ve added a US Election Data module. You can create maps of voter registration and actual election outcomes for presidential, congressional, and gubernatorial elections at the state and county level for the past decade or so. Unfortunately you can’t download any of the underlying data; they’ve partnered with Dave Leip’s and his Atlas of Presidential Elections, and he holds a virtual monopoly on this information. There are public and free alternatives for voter registration and federal election data at the state level, but they are from two different sources: the Census Current Population Survey for the former and the Federal Election Commission for the latter. A central, reliable, public source for county-level data is non-existent. Despite this large shortcoming, the Social Explorer module is still useful for exploring and visualizing election data.

US Election Data

The Social Explorer is available via our databases page, and you can access each of the modules under the Maps heading. Scroll down and pick the one you’d like.

Updates to the NYC Neighborhood Handout

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.

Updates to the ReferenceUSA Historical Data

Over the summer we purchased two files that include all of the businesses and many of their attributes that were in the ReferenceUSA database for 2013 and 2014. Our historical data collection now covers 1997 to 2014. The data is stored in large delimited text files, and current Baruch students, faculty and staff can request extracts from these files here:

https://www.baruch.cuny.edu/confluence/display/geoportal/ReferenceUSA+Historical

There’s also a link to this page from our list of databases, under ReferenceUSA Historical Data.

This resource is for users who want to study historical change in individual business establishments in a given area over time. In most cases users who make these requests need to have experience with working with large datasets. All of the requests I’ve filled to date are from graduate students or faculty.

Patrons who are looking for current data or who have basic requests should use the ReferenceUSA database instead. Patrons who are looking for historical or contemporary summaries of business establishments (i.e. sums or counts of businesses by type and geography instead of lists of individual businesses) can use the Census Bureau’s County or ZIP Code Business Patterns data instead.

GIS Workshop Registration for Fall 2015 Is Now Open

Registration is now open for the fall semester’s GIS (geographic information systems) Practicum, Introduction to GIS Using Open Source Software (featuring QGIS). The locations of the sessions will differ from previous years. The October sessions will be held at Baruch in the GIS Lab; they’ll be smaller (10 seats) and participants will need to bring a laptop. The November session will be held at the Department of Earth, Environmental, and Geospatial Sciences at Lehman College in the Bronx. This will be a larger session (20 seats) and PCs will be provided.

  • Oct 2nd
  • Oct 23rd
  • Nov 13th

The day-long workshop runs from 9am to 4:30pm. Current CUNY graduate students, faculty, and staff, and full-time Baruch and Lehman undergrads are eligible to register. Advance registration is required; the fee is $30 and includes a detailed tutorial manual and a light breakfast. Visit the GIS Practicum page to learn more and to register: http://guides.newman.baruch.cuny.edu/gis/gisprac.

Feel free to circulate this info to students and faculty, but please do not post via listservs. I have fliers in my office if anyone would like some to distribute.

I had people sign up throughout the summer for early notification, so they would receive an email as soon as registration opened. A lot of people signed up. If there is excess demand (more people than seats), I may try to squeeze an additional session in somewhere.

New Interface for the Statistical Abstract

Proquest has recently revised the interface to the Statistical Abstract of the United States, making it easier to use. The abstract is a good source for federal statistics that cover a wide range of subjects at the national, regional, and state levels. It’s also useful for determining which agency or department in the government is responsible for publishing a given statistic. Citations with links back to the original sources make it possible to uncover additional data (in particular, for smaller geographic areas like counties and places).

The interface gives you the ability to browse by subject and to drill down to individual topics, which mimic the chapters and tables that appear in the print edition. Alternatively you can search by keywords or phrases across the current or previous Proquest editions of the abstract. Even though the abstract is from 2015 and the first Proquest edition is from 2013, many of the tables contain historic data that stretch back several decades. After doing an initial browse or a search you have the ability to filter the results by date, source, and subject term. Tables can be downloaded in a presentation-friendly PDF format or a data-friendly Excel format.

stat_abstract_interface

The Statistical Abstract was an annual publication that was previously published by the Census Bureau. After over 130 years of continuous publication, the Census Bureau terminated the program for the sake of short-sighted budget cuts. The 2012 Abstract was the last public edition. Proquest acquired the rights to publish the abstract and it has been a proprietary, subscription-based product since 2013. Our subscription includes both the electronic (available via our Databases page) and print (Reference HA 202.A4) editions from Proquest. The Census Bureau still provides access to the older editions they published on their website at http://www.census.gov/prod/www/statistical_abstract.html.