Help! I’m an Accidental Government Information Librarian presents ... Historical Economic Data Sources & Economic Time Travel

The Government Resources Section of the North Carolina Library Association is holding a series of webinars designed to increase familiarity with government information resources, and the best strategies for navigating them.

 

Session #29 on historical economic data sources  will take place online on August 21 from 12:00 – 1:00 p.m. (Eastern). Please RSVP for the Session by August 20 at 5:00 pm using this link: https://tinyurl.com/grs-session29

In economics, historical data aren’t necessarily 200 years old; historical data could be two weeks old. That’s because economic data are revised, frequently. And those revisions mean that the historical data librarians find for patrons may not be the same values that an individual would have seen when the data were initially released. Economic data are made from estimates. Over time, more information becomes available and these estimates are revised. Policy-makers, businesses, and consumers make economic and financial decisions based on unrevised data available at a point in time. These unrevised are useful for studying historic decisions and economic policies. This webinar will describe sources available for uncovering historical economic data and methods for using those sources that provide a window into the past.  

 

Pamela Campbell is a Senior Librarian at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. She has been working with government documents for nearly four years, with a focus on economic history. Pamela is part of the team that provides FRASER <http://fraser.stlouisfed.org/>, a digital library dedicated to preserving the nation’s economic history.

 

Technical requirements: The webinar will be via Blackboard Collaborate. The conneting PC must have JAVA. On RSVP, a link will be sent that can be used to test the software. No microphone is needed as a chat system is available in the software, but speakers or headphones will be necessary.

 

If you have any questions, please contact Lynda Kellam (lmkellam@uncg.edu).   

The session will be recorded and made available after the live session, linked from the NCLA GRS web page (http://www.nclaonline.org/government-resources).

Call for Proposals - Kauffman Firm Survey Data Extension - Data Matching

Deadline January 15, 2012

As the Kauffman Foundation nears the completion of its eight-year panel study on new firms in the United States, the Kauffman Firm Survey (KFS) www.kauffman.org/kfs, they are seeking interested scholars who would like to extend the core survey data in ways that do not increase the burden on survey respondents. While more than 6,000 variables are included in the confidential version of the KFS microdata, the Foundation recognizes that there are additional opportunities for research that become available by incorporating new sources of data to leverage the existing KFS survey information. Through this grant program we hope to accomplish the following:

* Expand the community of experts involved with the KFS to include scholars with expertise in natural language processing, web scraping, and related approaches;
* Create reusable infrastructure; and
* Use the prototype/demo infrastructure to evaluate the effectiveness of the approach-missingness, accuracy, utility-to expand our understanding of different approaches for matching to existing data sets.

Multiple projects are likely to be funded with individual project budgets up to $50,000 being preferred.

Full details available at www.kauffman.org/KFSProposals.

On-Farm Renewable Energy Production Survey

The US Department of Agriculture has released the first-ever nationwide survey that looked at renewable energy practices on America's farms and ranches.

The results are published in tabular form (no microdata) and are available along with the 2007 Census of Agriculture Volume 1 Geographic Area Series and related reports on the NASS website at www.nass.usda.gov/.

Custom-designed tabulations may be developed when data are not published elsewhere. These tabulations are developed to individual user specifications on a cost-reimbursable basis and shared with the public.

http://www.agcensus.usda.gov/
http://www.agcensus.usda.gov/Publications/2007/Online_Highlights/On-Farm_Energy_Production/energy09.pdf

On-line Tool for Data Management Plans

The Digital Curation Centre has released a trial version of a new tool to assist users in developing data management plans http://dmponline.hatii.arts.gla.ac.uk/ 

Funding bodies increasingly require their grant-holders to produce and maintain Data Management Plans (DMPs), both at the bid-preparation stage and after funding has been secured.


DMP Online is designed to enable researchers to build and edit DMPs with a view to the requirements stipulated by the major UK funders.

If you are applying to one of the funders that make specific data-related demands at the application stage (i.e. AHRC, BBSRC, ESRC, MRC, Wellcome) you will see the funder's requirements in the left-hand column. These have been mapped to the appropriate clauses in the DCC Checklist for a Data Management Plan. By answering these questions, you should de facto meet the funder's requirements. The tool also presents options for developing DMPs for funding bodies that do not have specific data related demands.

For US researchers a prototype based on the DCC tool is in development http://www.cdlib.org/uc3/datamanagement/dmpo.html

UCLA ATS - useful resources

UCLA Academic Technology Services website contains some useful resources including introductory courses for statistical software such as STATA, SAS and SPSS; GIS resources; as well as discussions of more advanced statistical methods. Some of the resources are restricted to UCLA, but there is a lot freely available.

The Integrated Health Interview Series (IHIS) has released 4000 new harmonised variables from the US National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) from 1969-2009.

New topic areas include child and adult mental health, cancer family history, adult physical activity, and use of complementary and alternative medicines.

IHIS data is available for free via a web based extraction system at www.ihis.us