After months of hard work by our dedicated volunteers, the volunteer courthouse data collection stage of the pilot project is finished! The data has also been completely quality checked and vetted by USGS staff and is publicly available through The National Map and added to US Topo maps.
There is no longer a need to update, delete, or edit any of the courthouse data, so we're asking volunteers to focus their efforts on the other feature types we're collecting.
This addition to the User Guide has been made to support the TNMCorps' courthouse data collection pilot project. This pilot project has been established to test the ability of the TNMCorps' crowdsourcing model to collect a dataset from scratch.
Unlike other structures The National Map Corps collects, every courthouse will be added to the map by volunteers, therefore you will not see any courthouse points with a red border.
While putting together this pilot project, we discovered how complex and variable court systems are from state to state. This complexity has the potential to make courthouse collection and verification quite complicated, but we know our volunteers can handle it!
The following documentation attempts to provide
as close to a standard framework as possible for researching and adding
these points. If you run into situations for which you can't find an answer
in the documentation, please post your question on our
Q&A page
or send an email to
nationalmapcorps@usgs.gov. Help
us show that our volunteers are up to the challenge!
To edit courthouses, you will follow the same general guideline that you would use to check for missing points:
For more specific guidance on researching and editing courthouses, see the following sections:
Researching County Level Courthouses
The primary goal of this project is to create a complete and comprehensive dataset of state supreme court and county court courthouses, so we'd like your focus to be on adding new points to the map.
But if you are Peer Reviewer or an Advanced Editor you are welcome to start reviewing the green (or blue) courthouse points as they come in.