A week or two ago an e-mail from a map cataloger looking for a list of bounding box coordinates for US counties caught my eye. Reading the discussion that followed it was quite clear if anyone had thought to make such a digital list in the library community, it was suffering from terminal bureaucratic paralysis (death-by-committee) that is despairingly common in the library world (but this is a discussion for another post).
I knew where some suitable data could be obtained and had been itching to toy around with some geospatial python, so looking through Python Geospatial Development I found some starter code. Modifying this starter code and manually correcting a couple small anomalies I have produced a list [link] of US counties and their bounding box coordinates. I have attempted to make it easy for catalogers to just copy and paste the partial fields. The file is UTF-8 encoded, sorted by state and then county, basic metadata is given at the start of the file.
