Death is easy. GIS is hard.

Well, not necessarily. But it can seem that way. In any event, following up on our post of last week on zippy love, a modestly punched up collection of zip code-related links, we’ve added a few additional links to the LSNC GIS Mapping page:

• GIS Dictionary, which derives from ESRI’s hard bound A to Z GIS published last year. Befuddled by the difference between a quantile and a natural break? We can’t promise you’ll understand it but at least you can get a legit answer here.
• It bears repeating: Some of the most interesting things LSNC is currently doing with GIS are being documented over at the Race Equity Project. For example, last week Eric Schultheis (who has amiably been riding herd over the project since its inception last November) posted an item about TGR2SHP, a piece of freeware from the geography department at the University of Tennessee that enables you to convert TigerLine files into shape files. Plus, they offer other tools as well that facilitate extraction of select Census data. (Caveat: At the time of this posting, the UT geography department’s server appears to be down, so check back later as needed.)
• Last week the folks over at LSNTAP conducted their first official training on use of the Legal Services GIS Mapping National Server Project. (LSNTAP’s prototype site is also hosted at the University of Tennessee, so may not be accessible this weekend for the same reasons described, above.) For those interested, you can download the training. (We wish them well. And for what it’s worth, we feel your pain.)