Geographic Information Systems

The digital content format descriptions accessible here provide specific information about individual formats and their characteristics. Each description provides moderately detailed information and citations.

Useful - but Library of Congress definitions more authoritative (but not as continually updated)

Launched in 2020, the Geospatial Platform is working to make Federal Government geospatial data accessible to all under the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable).

TIGER = Topographically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing, including geodatabases and shapefiles designed to be used with ArcGIS and other GIS

EarthExplorer (EE) provides online search, browse display, metadata export, and data download for earth science data from the archives of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).

The Missouri Spatial Data Information Service provides public access to GIS and census data about the State of Missouri.

MARC is a nonprofit association of city and county governments and the metropolitan planning organization for the bistate Kansas City region.

Housed with the Kansas Geological Survey in Lawrence, KS. Kansas geospatial data, applications, services, projects, initiatives, and much more shared by DASC, State, Federal, Kansas Regents Institutions, and other partners.

The ESRI Open Data Hub houses over 250,000+ open data sets from 5,000+ organizations worldwide (as of 2020).

Many good data resources (including some mentioned elsewhere in this Research Guide). Evaluate sources of information critically!

Through the University of Minnesota, Minnesota Population Center. The National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS) provides, free of charge, aggregate census data and GIS-compatible boundary files for the United States between 1790 and 2014.

Natural Earth is a public domain map dataset available at 1:10m, 1:50m, and 1:110 million scales. Featuring tightly integrated vector and raster data, with Natural Earth you can make a variety of visually pleasing, well-crafted maps with cartography or GIS software.
Natural Earth was built through a collaboration of many volunteers and is supported by NACIS (North American Cartographic Information Society), and is free for use in any type of project

These country-level data extracts from the Open Street Map project are updated daily.

Supported by the NSF through UC-San Diego, OpenTopography facilitates community access to high-resolution, Earth science-oriented, topography data, and related tools and resources. Much of this data is high-resolution lidar topography data.