Now that the criteria have been set, the task of collecting the required data could begin. I went about this in a task-specific nature, looking at each of my five criteria and determining what data I would need to do that analysis.

Criteria	Data Required	How the Data was Obtained
Must be inside New Westminster.	Map of New Westminster in Idrisi32 format.	A map of the municipalities in the GVRD was found on the lab network server. It required some manipulation to isolate only New Westminter.
Must be in the catchment areas for the elementary schools that feed it.	Map with the catchment areas for the elementary schools.	Using the same street grid shapefile as was used for the bus stop digitization, I manually created the school map in ArcView. Addresses of the schools were obtained from the School District website. I then added the areas for the four residential associations that surround the schools, using information found on the City of New Westminster website.
Must be at least 250 m from a bus stop.	Map with the locations of bus stops in the target area.	I was able to find bus routes for Vancouver and Burnaby in the GVRD dataset on the network server, but nothing for Westminster. Therefore, I had to digitize my own data. I had an ArcView shapefile of the GVRD street layout; using this as a guide and, using information from the TransLink website, I manually digitized the bus stops in ArcView.
Must be on undeveloped or park land.	Landuse information.	A landuse map for municipalities in the GVRD was found in the Idrisi32-format GVRD dataset on the lab server. It required manipulation to (a) narrow it down to parks and undeveloped land, and (b) make the data specific only to New Westminster.
Must be located at least 750 meters from industrial land.	Landuse information.	A landuse map for municipalities in the GVRD was found in the Idrisi32-format GVRD dataset on the lab server. It required manipulation to (a) narrow it down to industrial land, and (b) make the data specific only to New Westminster.

The next section deals with data manipulation. For my purposes, I have defined manipulation as operations to changet the format of the data (i.e. using FME Universal Translator or other conversion programs). This does not include using operations such as EDIT, ASSIGN, RECLASS, OVERLAY, and/or MCE. These operations will be covered in the spatial analysis section.