Here are just two of the new items provided by NIH. You can subscribe to this news service via Twitter:

OnTheMap for Emergency Management is a public data tool from the U.S. Census Bureau that provides an intuitive web-based interface for accessing U.S. population and workforce statistics, in real time, for areas being affected by natural disasters. The tool allows users to retrieve reports containing detailed workforce, population, and housing characteristics for hurricanes, floods, wildfires, winter storms, and federal disaster declaration areas.

Community Health Maps Blog is an initiative from the National Library of Medicine (NLM) designed to share information about free and low cost and easy-to-use applications of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) mapping tools. The goal is to help community-based and other types of small organizations collect and visualize information about their communities with an eye towards using these techniques to support planning and decision-making about community health. NLM encourages the submission of blog postings by those who use such resources to carry out projects within their communities; consider posting details on how your use of mapping tools during a disaster supported health-related decision making.

**************************************************************

For those of you who share my dislike of Twitter (too short and too fleeting to be of much use), the author of the news items was gracious enough to share with me the site she uses to store and maintain them.