Every user of geospatial data has experienced the challenge of obtaining, organizing, storing, sharing, and visualizing their data. The variety of formats and data structures, as well as the disparate quality, of geospatial data can result in a dizzying accumulation of useful and useless pieces of spatially explicit information that must be poked, prodded, and wrangled into a single, unified dataset. This chapter addresses the basic concerns related to data acquisition and management of the various formats and qualities of geospatial data currently available for use in modern geographic information system (GIS) projects.