Latin American Resources

Latin America: GIS and Map Resources

Hard to know which will turn out to be useful, but this is what I found when I went looking for Latin American GIS coverage and data:

Instituto Panamericano de Geografía y Historia and Status of Mapping in the Americas

Government Cartography from Odden's Bookmarks (national listings)

Inter-American Geospatial Data Network

Costa Rica GIS Data Clearinghouse

Environmental Data-Sets Available On-Line (some Latin American)

Global Resource Information Database

Magellan Maps of South America

Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection from U. Texas (this looks like a good set of CIA maps in jpg and gif)

Report on Preliminary Inventory on Environmental and Sustainability Data Availability, Databases and Digital Maps for Latin America and the Caribbean

browse digitized maps from UC Berkeley (some nice historical maps of Mesoamerica, among others)

Georeferenced Population Data Sets of Mexico (ftp://ftp.ciesin.org/pub/data/Mexico/ for the data)

INEGI (Mexico's National Institute of Statistics, Geography and Information --mostly 1990s statistics)

LANIC Latin American statistics, by country --very mixed, but see 'Regional Resources' at the end, and Latin American Regional Resources

Latin American Statistical Sources from Cornell

Latin American Statistical Sources from Nanyang (!)

Thinking ahead a bit to David Parker's students and the maps they might make, I imagine several sorts:

maps identifying particular features (for basically illustrative purposes --garden variety maps, not really analytical)
maps based on political subdivisions of different countries (such as the states/departments/etc. on the maps in the Statistical Abstract of Latin America), in which the questions addressed have to do with distribution of one thing and another over time and space (essentially analytical maps, permitting comparisons)
(a challenge here is finding the data to plot)
maps with values plotted as z dimension (topography the model of this type, but precipitation or % type of vegetation, etc. as well)
(one does this sort of map if one has data associated with map coordinates, and there's not a lot obviously available for most Latin American countries)
maps that examine smaller (or maybe larger) units than a nation, some of which might be made from scratch, or from existing maps --like urban growth, regional deforestation, road-building, settlement pattern, etc.
(these would probably require digitization of paper maps, or might be created from orthophotos, etc.)
maps that illustrate the landscapes of novels --places, routes followed by characters, etc.
(the information for these would mostly come from paper maps, but some pretty classy things could be done with online versions, including hot links to illustrations, text, etc.)

So do we have access to data that might underwrite maps of the second type? And/or should the library seek, curate, store, serve such data?

This is a broader question than just David's classes --and has to do with venturing further into the realms of electronic information. It seems obvious that we (and/or the C School) will venture in these directions, and that the map server will maintain and deliver a variety of different sorts of maps, in addition to those of Rockbridge and environs that are my initial primary concern.

While I think of it, here's a list of our library holdings of the Country Studies volumes for Latin America --surely the best general-purpose descriptive summaries available.