A book review of The GIS Management Handbook, 3rd Edition

At a recent statewide GIS conference in Kentucky, I had the pleasure of meeting Peter Croswell, the President of Croswell-Schulte IT Consultants. Peter is also the author of The GIS Management Handbook, now in its 3rd Edition, published by Kessey Dewitt Publications. The book can be obtained here from URISA, and from the author’s consultancy, here. A review appeared in ArcUser not long ago, here.

As the book touches on many topics that are central to the interests of the Spatial Reserves data blog and our book, I asked Peter if I could review his book to share with our readers; he graciously agreed and my comments and his comments are below. I look forward to hearing your reactions!

From Peter:

When I began preparation of the first version of The GIS Management Handbook in 2008, I thought it would be a relatively straightforward and not too time-consuming effort relying largely on my 25+ years in GIS program and project management. It turned into much more than that—involving substantial literature research and contributions from many GIS professionals.  In the two editions that followed, the most recent one being the 3^rd Edition (2022), it is an up-to-date, comprehensive, and practical guide to planning, implementing, and managing GIS programs and projects.  My goal has also been to provide a useful resource to professionals, academicians, and students.  With the release of the Spanish version of the book last year, the audience has expanded quite a bit to readers in Spain and Latin America.

From Joseph:

The book’s central topics of how to develop, implement, and operate GIS projects from a management and program perspective are closely aligned to the themes of this blog because data acquisition, hosting, serving, and use are an important part of any GIS management, whether in government, nonprofit, academia, or private industry organization. In particular, Chapter 5 about funding and budgeting, and Chapter 6, about copyright, public information access, and related matters, are particularly relevant to data and its implications. The book’s chapters on database design (Chapter 7), and GIS projects and management (Chapter 9) also provide not only fundamental concepts, but practical, useful advice from someone who has spent his entire career in geospatial technologies.

Right away in chapter 1 (section, 1.5.5), the author jumps right in to the data topic with a practical discussion of standards and open systems affecting GIS, continuing in chapter 2 with the GIS Capability Maturity Model and the central role that data maintenance and sharing has. Data has a key role also in documenting requirements (Chapter 2), where Peter describes data types and formats, and in database design (also Chapter 2). National spatial data infrastructures, ethics, the GIS data product and service market, how to serve data, fee vs free (Chapter 5), data license agreements, open records laws, crowdsourcing (Chapter 6), data quality management and data sources (Chapter 7), and other topics we regularly discuss in this blog can be more fully understood by reading Peter’s book.

What I most like about Peter’s book is the literally thousands of examples that he provides across a wide variety of topics, so that the book is very practical in its focus. Croswell also provides extensive references and organizations with which to investigate further for best practices. The length and scope of this book are comprehensive but Peter has risen to the challenge of keeping it up to date, relevant, and extremely useful. As such, it provides an excellent supplement to our own GIS and Public Domain Data book and I highly recommend it.

—Joseph Kerski

IPUMS Libraries of Social Science and Health Data

Stemming back to my days as a US Census Bureau Geographer, I have long had deep admiration for the IPUMS data libraries. IPUMS provides census and survey data from around the world integrated across time and space. IPUMS integration and documentation makes it easy to study change, conduct comparative research, merge information across data types, and analyze individuals within family and community contexts. Data and services are available free of charge, all via https://ipums.org.

These data sets include families and households, immigration and migration, income and poverty, education, ethnicity and language, marriage and cohabitation, employment, income and poverty, reproductive health, nutrition, care access and utilization, disability, and vaccination. Data formats include spreadsheets, shapefiles, and much more. IPUMS also includes something that many of us in GIS hold dear–the National Historical GIS, tabular US Census data and GIS boundary files from 1790 to the present. But IPUMS goes far beyond even these amazing data sets. Indeed, IPUMS international is a data dissemination partnership between national statistical offices from around the world and IPUMS at the University of Minnesota. National statistical offices contribute their census and survey microdata and metadata, and IPUMS provides data integration and services to the national statistical office partner.

As a central theme of this blog and our book is “can this data service be trusted,” IPUMS is earning the Core Trust Seal as a sustainable and trusted data repository. Nearly 500 census and survey files from more than 100 countries have been entrusted and are now part of the largest microdata repository in the world.

Upon entering the IPUMS site, the user sees the main libraries, including IPUMS international, IPUMS USA, IPUMS Time Use, IPUMS Global Health, IPUMS Higher Ed, IPUMS Health Surveys, IPUMS IHGIS (population, housing, and agricultural census data), IPUMS CPS (Current Population Survey microdata including monthly surveys and supplements from 1962 to the present), and IPUMS NHGIS (mentioned above–historical US Census information).

IPUMS is run from the University of Minnesota and thus education and being helpful is central to their mission. It comes therefore as no surprise that the IPUMS data user experience is what I would characterize as very user friendly: The user is guided through the steps of selecting a region, a sample, and a set of variables, and then is presented with a “data cart”, somewhat like a “Amazon.com” experience but with data in your “cart.” It really doesn’t get any more straightforward than this, right down to guidance on clearly explaining to the user what the records will mean once chosen, in plain language (shown below). I salute their GUI designers and research staff for building this incredible resource.

I encourage you to give the IPUMS resources a try!

–Joseph Kerski

Reflections on Data Equity

A central theme of our book and this blog is access to data. The phrase “data equity” is increasingly used to describe who has access to data to make informed decisions. In a recent informative article in GovLoop, equity is defined as the “consistent and systematic fair, just, and impartial treatment of all individuals (pursuant to a US Executive Order, recommendations from the equitable data working group).” And when applied to data, it can “illuminate opportunities for targeted actions that will result in demonstrably improved outcomes for underserved communities.”

To achieve an “equitable data vision”, the following practices will be employed by US federal agencies: Make disaggregated data the norm while protecting privacy, catalyze existing federal infrastructure to leverage underused data, build capacity for robust equity assessment for policymaking and program implementation, galvanize diverse partnerships across levels of government and the research community, and be accountable to the American Public.

Recommendations outlined to achieve the vision set above include: Revise the Office of Management and Budget’s Statistical Policy standards for maintaining, collecting, and presenting federal data on race and ethnicity, generating disaggregated statistical estimates including increased funding for selected statistical agencies, catalyzing existing federal government infrastructure to leverage underused data, building capacity for robust equity assessment for policymaking and program implementation, and galvanizing diverse partnerships.

Included in the “being accountable” section is something I found particularly noteworthy: “Build data access tools that are user-friendly.” To this statement, I say “hooray!”, and indeed, advocating for user-friendly tools have been a central theme of this blog for over a decade now. Executive Order 13571 focuses on “transforming federal customer experience and service delivery to rebuild trust in government”. Specifically, it refers to a “time tax”: When an individual interacts with the government, the time it takes to obtain the necessary information, permit, or anything else often takes needlessly long, in other words, a “time tax” imposed on the individual. This is often much too burdensome and must be reduced.

As someone who worked in three federal agencies for over 21 years, I salute this goal but realize it will not easily be solved–the entanglements of regulations, sites created not with data users in mind, funding and staffing, and other challenges are many, but, we need to start somewhere. The tenets of this order need to be at the forefront of every agency creating and maintaining data portals and libraries, including geospatial data. Furthermore the agencies need to be working together: We’ve spent decades creating siloed data libraries within organizations. These were noble pursuits for their time but it’s a new era with new challenges, and collaboration and vision are keys to making the goals set forth in these documents a reality.

What are your reactions to this article? What stories can you share about your progress in data equity in your own organization?

–Joseph Kerski