Library unit provides vast resources

he River Campus Libraries have a new Social Science Data Services unit located in the Multimedia Center on the ground floor of Rush Rhees Library. Data Services' mission is to assist graduate students and faculty in locating and obtaining raw data to support their research. One of its major functions is to promote usage of a large data resource known as ICPSR.

Established in 1962, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research is a nonprofit membership-based organization providing access to the world's largest archive of computer-based research and instructional data for the social sciences. The University is one of over 325 North American institutional members of ICPSR.

The University's institutional membership makes all ICPSR materials available to students, faculty, and staff. The materials consist of datasets and codebooks resulting from social survey research of all kinds, including, in many cases, SAS and SPSS command files that provide the first step in formatting the raw data files. (Users of Data Services' resources must be able to perform their own analysis using a statistical software package such as SAS, SPSS, S+, or Stata.)

ICPSR's entire collection is online. The data holdings cover a broad range of disciplines including political science, sociology, demography, economics, history, education, gerontology, criminal justice, public health, foreign policy, and law. ICPSR's holdings are geopolitically and temporally broad as well, including data from over 13 countries and studies that include data from the late 1700s and middle 1800s.

The ICPSR Web site (www.icpsr.umich.edu) provides various searching and browsing capabilities. The online data holdings can be searched by title, study description (abstract), principal investigator name, or study number, or users can browse by subject category in 18 major areas. In addition, PDF versions of codebooks are available to anyone for searching and downloading. The only restriction is on the data files themselves, which require downloading by a member of Data Services.

Students, faculty, and staff in all fields are encouraged to explore ICPSR's data resources and to contact Data Services staff with any questions: Suzanne Bell, x5-9317, sbell@rcl.lib.rochester.edu; or Fadi Dagher, x3-3451, fdagher@rcl.lib.rochester.edu. More information--including an online data request form and links to other data and statistics Web sites--is available on the Data Services Web page at www.lib.rochester.edu/ssds/.

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