-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: Sources for historic business address data for geocoding?
Date: Tue, 9 Apr 2013 16:08:15 -0400 (EDT)
From: Paige G Andrew <[log in to unmask]>
To: Air Photo Maps, GIS Forum - Map Librarianship <[log in to unmask]>
Funny you should mention this need, even though I cannot help
personally. That said, I know that some recent projects using historical
maps from the first half of the 20th century and geocoding businesses
and other objects on them for a larger research project used early
telephone directories to gather this kind of information. The
forthcoming issue (late April/early May) of the Journal of Map and
Geography Libraries contains a description of a project done in Atlanta
at Georgia State University in one article, a second one called
"AddressingHistory" for short shares the use of Scottish Post Office
Directories as textual resources for business addresses and large-scale
historical maps together in a major project that is being extended more
broadly.
I know that doesn't help at the moment, but at least you know that this
kind of work IS being done elsewhere (I suspect in a lot of different
places under different contexts) so you'll probably get some better
feedback from other responders.
Sincerely,
Paige
----- Original Message -----
From: "Angie Cope, American Geographical Society Library, UW Milwaukee"
<[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Tuesday, April 9, 2013 3:52:26 PM
Subject: Sources for historic business address data for geocoding?
-------- Original Message --------
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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