I am looking for a website or company that has in stock and would
allow me to download or purchase geographic US ZIP code boundaries
from 1995 (or at least prior to 1999), in a format I can use in
standard mapping software.
The issue here is that companies like Teleatlas (formerly GDT) and
others sell this data (termed shapefiles or arcgis shapefiles) for
current 2004 or 2005 ZIP code boundaries. Teleatlas has historical
ZIPs only back to 2000. But some library or somewhere must have kept
the ones from '95,'96, '97 or '98, becuase they sold them back then
also. I can see reference to them on a website at NC State Library,
but I am not an NC State member.
I want this becuase I have business data for ZIPs back to 1995, but I
need the earliest possible ZIP code boundaries to match. (Aside-
while not all ZIPs have a geographic location, say the government ZIP
codes, many ZIPs have been mapped geographically by people other than
the USPS. I don't need all ZIP codes, just the ones that have some
geographic basis. But anyone that sells Zip boundaries will have
addressed this already. The USPS will probably not help with this,
since ZIP codes are officially for mail delivery, not geography) |
Request for Question Clarification by
pafalafa-ga
on
01 Mar 2005 11:19 PST
I found a file from 1999, which doesn't look to me like it quite meets
your needs, but I wanted to post some information here to be sure.
The file is described this way:
----------
This file contains all 5-digit ZIP codes defined as of November 1,
1999, the state and county FIPS codes and the Post Office names
associated with them. (Note ? For ZIP codes that cross county
boundaries, the Post Office file assigns that ZIP code to just one of
the counties rather than to each county.)
The Census Bureau then determined a geographic coordinate (latitude
and longitude) for each ZIP code in the City-State file by processing
it against the Bureau?s internal TIGER database for the state and
county specified for the ZIP code. (Before processing the file against
TIGER, the Census Bureau excluded overseas military APO/FPO records
from the file). For those records where the ZIP code could not be
located in the TIGER database, the county internal point (in many
cases the geographic centroid) was assigned to the ZIP code. This
typically occurred on records containing either a ?P? or ?U? in the
ZIP_CLASS field.
The database structure, including field names, data types, field
lengths, number of decimal places, and field descriptions for file
ZIPNOV99.DBF are as follows:
ZIP_CODE C 5
The 5-digit zip code.
LATITUDE C 10
Latitude expressed as a signed integer with six decimal places.
Negative numbers are in the southern hemisphere.
LONGITUDE C 11
Longitude expressed as a signed integer with six decimal places.
Negative numbers are in the eastern hemisphere.
ZIP_CLASS C 1
Zip Code classification. Values are:
M = APO/FPO Military Zip
P = P.O. Box
U = Unique Zip, assigned to large corporations or government agencies
Blank = Non-unique Zip, shared by numerous residences and businesses
PONAME C 28
USPS Post Office name.
STATE C 2
Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) state code.
COUNTY C 3
FIPS county code.
IDMARPLOT C 16
Used by the LandView 4 program
----------
Let me know if you need more information about this.
pafalafa-ga
|
Request for Question Clarification by
pafalafa-ga
on
01 Mar 2005 12:04 PST
You might want to take a look at this page as well:
http://spatialnews.geocomm.com/newsletter/2000/jan/zipcodes.html
and in particular:
US Census Bureau
This Equivalency file contains the 300 characters in the
identification section of the data dictionary used in all 1990 STF's.
It equates 1990 census block numbers with the areas that approximate
October 1991 ZIP Codes used by the USPS to deliver mail. The File
provides a 5-digit ZIP Code for each land block number within each
State with a few exceptions
The TIGER 98 CD file, distributed by the Census Bureau and available
(usually for free, or nominal duplication charge) throughout the
United States from Affiliated State Data Centers, contain zip+4 points
in zip-compressed file format. By extracting these files and importing
them into any GIS package which can read TIGER file format, a user can
develop "relatively" accurate zip+4 geo-coding capability at virtually
no cost (other than staff & cpu time to build the data set). Kevin F.
Byrnes, demographer with Virginia Dept. for the Aging did this for the
Commonwealth of Virginia in less than 4 hours using PK-Zip and
Caliper's Maptitude 4.1 on his home PC and now has a data layer for
Virginia containing over 450,000 zip+4 data points. Thanks for the tip
Kevin!
Election Data Services
Election Data Services Inc. is a political consulting firm
specializing in redistricting, election administration, and the
analysis and presentation of census and political data with
GIS.ZIP+DISTRICT is a database that links 5- and 9-digit ZIP Codes
with congressional and state legislative districts (Senate and House)
in all 50 states. The ZIP+DISTRICT database is updated with quarterly
releases of new postal data and district boundary changes.
Sammamish Data Systems
Providers of Postal Carrier Route files that are updated quarterly
within a month of the release of the Postal Service's ZIP+4 database.
Boundaries literally go down back fence lines as they do in the real
world. The timely, quarterly updates allows mailers to use these files
to incorporate their CASS certified lists with the latest carrier
route configurations. The only supplier of ZIP+2 boundary files in the
United States. They also have ZIP+4 Centroid files which are also
updated quarterly and incorporate information from several sources to
insure the highest level of precision. Data are available in
GeoSight's .RFX format, MapInfo's .MID/.MIF format and an ASCII string
format. Printed maps are also available for individual areas.
|
Clarification of Question by
icic-ga
on
01 Mar 2005 12:27 PST
Unfortunately - we just need one year prior - 98 or 97 or96or95. I
havent checked into all the sites, but might well be helpful. Let me
look into it, and if i find it from here, and I can get you a sort of
finders 'commission' instead.
I don;t know if this format that you found for 99 works, but if the
lat and long data are there for the US ZIP codes, we can figure out
how to map it. In other words, if you found this for 97, I think we
would be set.
|
Request for Question Clarification by
pafalafa-ga
on
01 Mar 2005 12:31 PST
The lat/longs are definitely there for '99, but they're more like
centroids than boundaries, as far as I understand things.
As for the other sources, I'd be happy to look myself, but my
knowledge of mapping files is limited...you're probably better off
checking these few sites on your own to see if there's a match with
your needs.
Let me know how it works out.
paf
|
Clarification of Question by
icic-ga
on
01 Mar 2005 13:49 PST
Okay- thanks for your help- yes we are looking more for the edges then
the centroids.
It is funny becuase this should be somewhere- a lot of data is
provided back through the years by ZIP codes, but if no one has the
old boundaries, than people are just applying data to perhaps totally
different areas. I think most people must just ignore this.
I am still loking thorugh this stuff to see where it leads.
|
Request for Question Clarification by
pafalafa-ga
on
16 Mar 2005 11:01 PST
icic-ga,
I'm still on this, and in fact, I might have a lead.
A company I contacted thinks they might have the boundary data
available, and is checking their archives. In the mean time, they
would like to know what format you would like the data in.
Let me know your preferred format.
I'll get back to you when I knos some more.
paf
|
Request for Question Clarification by
pafalafa-ga
on
19 Mar 2005 14:30 PST
icic-gq,
I don't want the trail to go cold on this, so I will be replying to my
contact early next week to confirm that a vintage zip file is
available. It would help to able to give them some specifics about
the format you are after.
Can you let me know...?
Thanks,
pafalafa-ga
|
Clarification of Question by
icic-ga
on
21 Mar 2005 09:57 PST
The program we use to view is in ArcMap. so perhaps you could just
ask the vendor if it is readable by our Arcmap (which is version 9.1,
but should e able to read lower versions). Or at least that is the
program we are using. So long as this is readable by ArcMap it is
fine. I think the version before ArcMap was called ArcView, so it
could be in an Arcview 3.3 format.
good work - hope this works out.
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