#data user question

[coloradoopendatastatus-blog]

School Districts and Locations

Q: Hello there Colorado Information Marketplace. I am curious if you have School Districts and Locations in one dataset. I need them combined for my project.

A: Thanks for your data inquiry on School Locations. Unfortunately we don’t have these datasets combined into a single download, but you can find both separately on the Colorado Information Marketplace at data.colorado.gov.

I'm sure you've already found the GeoJSON/shapefile for School Districts of Colorado that was published by Go Code Colorado and the Department of Local Affairs in 2016, but you're right - the geospatial data on school locations is a bit harder to find.

The State's GIS office has created a dataset called Community Anchor Institutions that has k-12 schools as one of the data types. This dataset is only in its third year of maturity, so it is possible that some schools are not through the quality assurance steps required for public release, but it should be a good start for you.

[coloradoopendatastatus-blog]

Census Field Descriptions Viewer

Q: ”Hi! I've been using a dataset called "Census Tracts in Colorado 2010-2014" (https://data.colorado.gov/Demographics/Census-Tracts-in-Colorado-2010-2014/fifs-d43p) (File name: ACS1014_tract.csv), and I can't seem to find an associated metadata file to make sense of the some of the field/header names. Do you know where I can find this information? Thank you very much!”

A: The information you are seeking is referred to as “field descriptions,” and you cannot currently export them in a csv. However, the industrious folks at Socrata are working hard to make that feature available on the Colorado Information Marketplace at data.colorado.gov. Until then, our partners at Go Code Colorado have created a “Field Descriptions Viewer” on their Go Code Colorado Current Datasets webpage. Once on that page, follow these three simple steps:

Expand the tiny triangle beside the dataset title/link and view the field descriptions.

Scroll down to the second table entitled "Datasets Field Information"

Click through the list (or jump ahead) to page 7 of 7 to find the dataset title "Census Tracts in Colorado 2010-2014”