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Subject:        Sources for historic business address data for geocoding?
Date:   Tue, 9 Apr 2013 19:40:25 +0000
From:   Francis Donnelly <[log in to unmask]>
To:     [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>



Hello List,

I have a faculty member who is interested in building a dataset of names
and addresses for particular categories of businesses for specific
cities, so she can geocode and plot them to do some GIS analyses. The
natural go-to source is Reference USA, since their data is already geocoded.

The problem is - she needs historical data - 10 to 20 to 30 years in the
past. She's contacted Reference USA and discovered that they are
planning to offer a historical module, but it will only go back to 1997.
They offered to create a custom-made extract for her, at a very high price.

Can anyone recommend another source or product? In the "old" days, the
way to do this was to sort through phone books / yellow pages, do some
data entry to grab addresses for businesses under specific headings, and
then address match / geocode. I'm wondering if anyone has created a
project that digitized phone books from the recent past, or if there are
some 1990s-era CD ROM products still floating around. Or - is this one
of those things that has to be done the old fashioned way, extracting
data from paper directories or microfiche?

Thanks & Best - Frank

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*Frank Donnelly* | Geospatial Data Librarian | Baruch College CUNY

[log in to unmask] | 646-312-1657

http://guides.newman.baruch.cuny.edu/gis | http://gothos.info

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