Free Sources
Project Gutenberg offers over 54,000 free eBooks, most of which can be downloaded as text.
"The Internet Archive offers over 12,000,000 freely downloadable books and texts."
The UCI Network Data Repository is an effort to facilitate the scientific study of networks. Feel free to browse and download the currently available datasets.
With items spanning seven centuries, four continents and topics local to international, the Baylor University Libraries Digital Collections are among the most unique in the world. Professional historians, scholars, researchers, genealogists and passionate amateurs alike will find our collections enlightening, enriching and of the highest quality.
Documenting the American South (DocSouth) is a digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. Currently DocSouth includes sixteen thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs.
re3data.org is a global registry of research data repositories that covers research data repositories from different academic disciplines. It presents repositories for the permanent storage and access of data sets to researchers, funding bodies, publishers and scholarly institutions. re3data.org promotes a culture of sharing, increased access and better visibility of research data.
The Google Books Ngram Viewer is optimized for quick inquiries into the usage of small sets of phrases. If you're interested in performing a large scale analysis on the underlying data, you might prefer to download a portion of the corpora yourself. Or all of it, if you have the bandwidth and space. We're happy to oblige.
These datasets were generated in July 2012 (Version 2) and July 2009 (Version 1); we will update these datasets as our book scanning continues, and the updated versions will have distinct and persistent version identifiers (20120701 and 20090715 for the current sets).
Proprietary Sources
Serves as a digital repository for major research institutions and libraries to archive their immense digital collections and to ensure that the cultural record that these digital collections represent is preserved and accessible today and in the future. HathiTrust was founded in 2008 and includes content from the Google Books project and Internet Archive.
ACS Overview
The American Community Survey (ACS) is an annual survey held by the U.S. Census Bureau. The ACS supplements the Decennial Censuses by providing these annual updates and in 2010 replaces the Census Long Form.
The ACS annually receives data from approximately 2.5% of the U.S. population. This amounts to 12.5% for the 5-year estimates. (Census 2000 Long Form sampled 17% of the population.) This increases the sampling error of the ACS to 1.3 times larger than the 2000 Long Form. However, arguments in favor of the ACS are (1) annual release of statistics, and (2) the maintaining of a permanent and professional staff (as opposed to temporary employees) may result in lower rates of non-sample error.
Decennial Census Overview
The Decennial Census - Regarding the counting of the U.S. population to determine the number of representatives in the House of Representatives, Article I Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution states that "The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct."
The first Decennial Census was counted in 1790 and has been counted and reported every 10 years since then.
Proprietary Sources
Provides access to 220 years of demographic data and 18 000 maps covering census, economic, election, religion data and more. Users can create thematic and interactive maps using basic GIS and data manipulation. In addition, users can download data or tables and create snapshots of maps.
Provides statistical data from U.S. government publications, state and private sources, and international organizations. Conduct search by keyword(s) and limit results by publishing organization, geographic region, local area, or broad subject. Data may be further restricted by demographic features (age, marital status, industry, etc.)
Provides directory information on U.S. business and residential listings. Searching may be done by either using the "quick search" option (searches by name, location) or by using the "custom search" option. With the custom search, geographic location, SIC/NAICS code, revenue, number of employees, ownership, financial data, or any combination of the above may be used as search terms. In addition to address and phone number, each entry includes officer names and titles, corporate affiliation, and business type, among other information.
ICPSR maintains and provides access to a vast archive of social science data for research and instruction. Includes data from Afrobarometer.
Free Sources
Here you will find data, tools, and resources to conduct research, develop web and mobile applications, design data visualizations, and more.
The National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS) provides population, housing, agricultural, and economic data, along with GIS-compatible boundary files, for geographic units in the United States from 1790 to the present.
[2012/2013 - Current]
The Texas Academic Performance Reports (TAPR) pull together a wide range of information on the performance of students in each school and district in Texas every year.
Downloadable tables and shapefiles to the voter tabulation district level in their FTP server.
The compendium includes 426 indicators from the six collections.
Free Sources
The Open Geoportal is a collaboratively developed, open source, federated web application to rapidly discover, preview, and retrieve geospatial data from multiple repositories.
Here you will find data, tools, and resources to conduct research, develop web and mobile applications, design data visualizations, and more.
The National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS) provides population, housing, agricultural, and economic data, along with GIS-compatible boundary files, for geographic units in the United States from 1790 to the present.
This server has data extracts from the OpenStreetMap project which are normally updated every day.
The Geospatial Data Gateway (GDG) provides access to a map library of over 100 high resolution vector and raster layers in the Geospatial Data Warehouse.
TIGER products are spatial extracts from the Census Bureau's MAF/TIGER database, containing features such as roads, railroads, rivers, as well as legal and statistical geographic areas.
Provides parcels, railroads, rows, school districts, street center-line, subdivisions, water districts, abstracts, cities, easements, and more.
TNRIS archives, maintains, and distributes the largest collection of current and historical geographic data sets for the State of Texas.
Download GIS datasets maintained by the TCEQ. Each dataset is available in shapefile (shp), file geodatabase (gdb), and Google Earth (kmz) formats.
This page contains a collection of dynamic, interactive mapping viewers, as well as downloadable GIS layers, that give Texans access to the vast collection of spatial data available at the agency.
The GIS datasets listed below are related to various types of natural features. Although TWDB utilizes this data in our most commonly used maps, some of the datasets were created and are maintained by other state and federal agencies.
TPWD works with agencies, land owners, and the public to provide data and mapping applications about the natural and cultural resources of Texas.
WorldClim version 2 has average monthly climate data for minimum, mean, and maximum temperature and for precipitation for 1970-2000.
You can download the variables for different spatial resolutions, from 30 seconds (~1 km2) to 10 minutes (~340 km2). Each download is a "zip" file containing 12 GeoTiff (.tif) files, one for each month of the year (January is 1; December is 12).
Download country level data for any country in the world: administrative boundaries, roads, railroads, altitude, land cover, population density.
Shapefile, raster, or geodatabase formats that are readily useable in GIS software.
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