By Melinda Kernik.
The Data Repository for the University of Minnesota (DRUM) archives data generated from student, staff, and faculty researchers from a wide range of disciplines. Over fifty of the datasets have a spatial component, with varied topics including:
Librarian curators review all submissions to DRUM and work with researchers to ensure that the data are complete and well described.
Collection highlight
One of the most frequently downloaded items in DRUM is data about racially restrictive covenants in Hennepin County. The files have been downloaded more than 6500 times in the last 11 months!
Racial covenants were legal clauses embedded in property records that restricted ownership and occupancy of land parcels based on race. These covenants dramatically reshaped the demographic landscape of American cities in the first half of the twentieth century. They were deemed to be legally unenforceable in 1948 by the United States Supreme Court, but continued to be inserted into property records until the mid-1950s. The Mapping Prejudice project compiled the data using optical character recognition (OCR) of digitized housing deeds and crowdsourcing. The attribute-rich data are available as a shapefile, spreadsheet, or web service.
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Caption: Locations of racially-restrictive covenants in Hennepin County [Link] |
What BTAA Library submitted the collection?
University of Minnesota
Have questions about this collection, the BTAA geoportal, or maps and geospatial data in general? Please don’t hesitate to contact our project team!
Melinda Kernik is the Spatial Data Analyst and Curator at the University of Minnesota