ICPSR hosting events for Love Data Week (Monday, 2/12/18 – Friday, 2/16/18)!
ICPSR is thrilled to be a part of Love Data Week 2018. We'll be sharing data stories daily, and hosting a webinar (more details below). We're also sponsoring an ICPSR Data Stories contest! We're looking forward to sharing some of these stories with you soon. #LoveData18
Webinar: Experience ICPSR's New Data Dissemination System
ICPSR’s new data dissemination system is here! Many joined us for a live demo on Thursday, February 15. The demo takes viewers through updated and more user-friendly data interfaces from data discovery, to evaluation, to download, usage, and interpretation. You will see improved navigationacross studies, variables, data-related citations, series, and more. Our presenters are part of the team that envisioned, built, and launched this new data management system. It was built specifically for research data discovery, reuse, and preservation, and made possible by the meticulous data curation, including extensive metadata, that ICPSR curators undertake as they care for data brought into ICPSR’s holdings. Our presenters’ excitement is contagious, and you won’t want to miss this broadcast that coincidentally, is being held during Love Data Week! This webinar is free and open to the public, and we urge you to share this invitation broadly. And, those that attend may receive a few insights on still more improvements coming soon, because we’re not done!
Email your data story to the ICPSR Data Story Contest!
What are your successes/failures in dealing with data? Email your story (150 words max.) to our ICPSR Data Stories contest (myICPSRstory@umich.edu) for #LoveData18! The winner(s) will be announced on Monday, Feb. 19 and will receive a boxful of nifty ICPSR swag! #LoveData18
Update: Winning entries below!
"I was helping a student researching gasoline prices and public-transit use. The data she needed were spread across 34,770 worksheets in 1140 Excel files, and her adviser didn't know how to combine them together efficiently. So, I asked her for a few months of data with which I could experiment. The files were very consistent in terms of formatting, so I was able to write up Stata syntax that imported the worksheets, cleaned them up, and combined them into a single dataset. We met to review the syntax, which she then edited to clean up and combine the rest of her data. We started with data that were effectively unusable and turned them into something she could actually analyze. In her thesis, the student thanked me for being 'absolutely instrumental to [her] collection and analysis of the data,' which remains one of my proudest moments as a data librarian."
Rob O'Reilly, Data Services Librarian at Emory University
"In honor of Love Data Week, here’s a shout out to one of my favorite data archives/resources.
Many social scientists are familiar with ICPSR, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, but faculty may not always keep up with the new goodies at the archive. Since I became a data librarian in 2007, ICPSR has expanded its resources widely to include a wealth of training materials. Along with its Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Research, ICPSR also has a variety of modules for teaching and learning about data, data concepts, social science concepts, and more. My favorite tool is the Social Science Variables Database that allows users to search for variables in the major data studies, about 76% of ICPSR’s holdings. In addition to isolating data studies with specific, required variables, the tool allows users to examine the questions being asked across data studies. ICPSR has much more in its expansive offerings, especially for members of its consortium. Definitely worth a look and some love!"
Lynda Kellam, Data Services and Government Information Librarian at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro’s University Libraries
Feb 8, 2018