Batch Gathering Municipal GIS Data

[Ryan Bergeron]

Does anyone have experience in collecting GIS info from municipalities in batches? I'm not sure if the rest of the country is like this, but towns in Connecticut have web-based GIS explorers, but very little ability to manipulate and query the data. I am looking for a way to gather the data into shapefiles to do this. I figured this could be obtained through a FOIA request, but I can only imagine that would be difficult and time consuming. My only other idea was a Python script, but I'm still very new to scripting.