USGS DRG (Digitized Raster Graphic) Files

Somewhere in Dallas, Texas…

I’ve written on this blog before about the difficulties of teaching yourself GIS when much of your day-to-day grind (in a non-GIS company ) doesn’t confront you with GISsable challenges. Well, turns out it’s only a question of trying a little harder. Here is a simple example of daily-grind-education…

One of our engineers was looking for a USGS topo map this morning. Of course, I was asked: “Can’t you get me one with GIS ?” My first reaction was to say: Probably … but I’m not sure I have the data for that. ( I had been looking for sources for DEM files the other day without location any free data.)

During lunch, I started browsing the latest addition to my GIS library

Desktop GIS: Mapping the Planet with Open Source Tools, and on page 4, it mentions a free source of DRG files: http://www.libremap.org.

Needless to say, it took about 5 minutes to find, download, scale, and print the needed section from the topomap, hopefully make everyone happy, and add another simple task to my growing arsenal of GIS weapons. Okay, I didn’t save the planet. But I felt like I learned something useful.