Policy Map, a recent addition to the Penn Library website, is a great resource to go to for up to date demographic data. Just tap in a city or zip code and you have access to thousands of indicators related to demographics, crime, money and income, real estate, education, energy, and health. In addition to zip code and city, you can search by census tract, state, county, school districts, and legislative or Congressional districts. Policy Map generates its data in the form of maps, data tables and reports which can be easily exported as jpegs or pdfs. The number of indicators is noteworthy. You can get demographic breakdowns for ethnicity, religion, voting, etc. from a lot of sources but Policy Map offers many additional profile handles as illustrated by a search I did comparing obesity figures in Philadelphia in 2008 versus 2006.
Click here to read this article by Sharon Black on the Annenberg Library blog on February 22, 2010.
If you are a current student, faculty member or staff of the University with the credentials to access the Library’s licensed electronic resources, you can now access PolicyMap through the Library’s system. Accessing the site through the library gives you automatic access to all of the data and functionality available through PolicyMap. Create maps and tables, generate reports and conduct analysis that you can pull directly into your University work. Your use of the site through the library is governed by Terms of Use that can be found on the main PolicyMap page within the library system or you can read them here.
If you would like more information about licenses available to libraries, just give us a call or send an email at info@policymap.com or 866-923-MAPS.
The PolicyMap Team
As part of the launch of her Let’s Move initiative against childhood obesity, First Lady Michele Obama, US Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and U.S. Treasury Secretary Geithner were in Philadelphia today to talk about the need for healthy food options in so many of our nation’s neighborhoods. To give you a sense – visually – of how nutrition factors differ across our nation, we’ve loaded a number of the indicators recently published by the Department of Agriculture’s Food Atlas (click here) into PolicyMap.
In PolicyMap, look under the Health tab in the Add Data Layer menu to see, for example, how the percentage of people with diabetes differs across the nation.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be loading more of this health data and will keep you posted as we do. And check out LetsMove.gov, too.
The PolicyMap Team
Check out December preliminary preliminary United States unemployment rates and totals for your area. PolicyMap has labor force and unemployment data available at the county, state, and metropolitan area (CBSA) geographies. Or bring the most updated local unemployment data to your own website with PolicyMap’s free unemployment widget.
Loading an interactive unemployment map to your website is easy, just embed the code below. Your visitors can zoom in, pan around and click on any area to see the underlying unemployment statistics for every county in the nation. They can also toggle between months and years to see values for previous periods of time going all the way back to 2000. Darker shades on the map identify counties with higher rates or numbers of unemployed persons. Click on the map below to try it out:
To bring this dynamic mapping experience to your site, just embed the HTML code below onto your website.
<div style="text-align:center">
<iframe src="http://www.policymap.com/widget.jsp?userid=892&wid=4&height=500&i=9841103&btd=4&search=true&nomenus=true" width="100%" height="700px" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0" name="PolicyMap"></iframe>
<div style="font:13px arial,geneva,helvetica,sans-serif">Powered by <a style="text-decoration:underline" target="_blank" href="http://www.policymap.com">www.policymap.com</a>, an <a style="text-decoration:underline" target="_blank" href="http://www.policymap.com">online mapping tool</a> and data warehouse.</div></div>
As always, call us at 1-866-923-MAPS (6277) or email with any questions. We’d love to hear from you!
Welcome to our series on helpful tips for PolicyMap. With over 10,000 data indicators and many online features, we hope our series can help users better utilize PolicyMap. For a complete training, please join a free online session here: Click Here
Did you know you can print a map of just your target area shaded and have the surrounding area clear? We call this feature "island printing." To use island printing:
- Search for your default location. Your searched location will be the area the map will shade by. (i.e. searching for Chicago will only shade the city of Chicago when you choose "island printing.")
- Create a map as normal with a data layer and Add Sites.
- When you are ready to print the map, choose "only shade selected region."
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