Members of the Duke community who are engaged in research relating to the campus infrastructure can now download GIS Layers of the Duke campus and surrounding areas. These are in formats compatible with ArcGIS software, and some (the shapefiles) are importable into Google Earth Pro.
The layers were created by Duke’s Facility Management and are being provided for download by Perkins Library’s Data & GIS Services Department. Categories of data include general campus features (e.g., building footprints, parking lots, crosswalks, Duke Garden trails), campus vegetation (e.g., coniferous trees, hedges), topography (contour lines), and color aerial photography in geo-referenced MrSID compressed format. The area of coverage includes not only West, Central, and East campuses, but many of the surrounding Durham neighborhoods. But no, undergrads, we have nothing showing the tunnels!
We hope to improve the documentation over time with improved metadata, as well as periodically update the layers. Users should contact Mark Thomas or other staff in the Data & GIS Services Department for help in using this data.
Since this was posted, we’ve added metadata for the files in shapefile format (although in many cases it doesn’t have much more than bounding coordinates and projection information). We’ve also added clickable index maps to the aerial photography of campus, and the aerial photo titles can be downloaded one-at-a-time (not just a single gigantic 559 Mb zipped file of all tiles together). See the Aerial Photography by Tile page.