State Agency Databases Activity Report 9/30/2012
The past two weeks have seen significant activity at the State Agency Databases Across the Fifty States project at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/State_Agency_Databases, mostly as a result of our quarterly link check and search for new databases. For a full list of changes for the past two weeks, please visit http://tinyurl.com/statedbs14d. Here are some highlights: APP VERSIONS OF STATE DATABASES We've started to notice mobile apps being connected to databases produced by state agencies. We will be posting these to our project pages as we discover them. We're not looking to create a directory of ALL state mobile apps, just the ones that are connected to state databases. For now, most of the apps we've found were discovered by Susanne Caro and live on the Utah project page. Here are the ones she's found so far: ANDROID UDOT Traffic App -"The UDOT Traffic app provides commuters and travelers with mobile access to information for Utah roadways from the Utah Department of Transportation's Intelligent Transportation System (ITS)..." iOS Salt Lake County Map Book - "The Salt Lake County Map Book App was created as a GIS/Mapping tool to help emergency responders navigate the County. The Map Book breaks down the county into a grid of 287 maps design at a scale of 1:10,000, with every street name and corresponding coordinate labeled. We have also identified fire stations, schools, fire hydrants" Utah County Maps - "Utah Co Maps enables users to search property records by address or by panning and zooming around a topographic map of Utah County. Once a parcel is selected, users can access detailed property information including ownership history, property values, improvement information, and more." Utah Professional License Lookup - Utah Professional License Lookup app for the iPhone for checking on the professional license status of professionals offering services that require state licensure. DATABASES ADDED HEALTHCARE PRACTITIONERS (Lynn McClelland) Idaho Board of Nursing Primary Source Verification - Search for nurses by license type, license number, and/ or name. Users can filter on this page for disciplinary actions. NEW HAMPSHIRE (Linda Johnson) Banking Enforcement Orders - Searchable site for Enforcement Orders from 2006-. Can search by docket number or party name as well as browse alphabetically by entity name. NORTH CAROLINA (Jennifer Davison) North Carolina Board of Physical Therapy Examiners -Search for licensed physical therapists. TEXAS (Ann Ellis) Foreign Companies with Operations in Texas - This database provides a representative sample of significant non-U.S. companies doing business in Texas. It is updated by Business Research staff, and allows searches by city, country, industry, and keyword. UTAH (Susanne Caro) InciWed-Utah (Fire) Incidents - Hosted by InciWeb an inter-agency management system), this site has a searchable database of current fires including prescribed burns. Search includes age, type and status limiters. Continue reading
ICPSR Election Data Webcasts
The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), the large social-sciences data archive at the University of Michigan, is hosting a series of webcasts on October 1 through 3 that feature election data held in ICPSR's archives. The webcasts will show how to use them for analysis and teaching.
- Welcome to the 2012 ICPSR Data Fair!, ICPSR. The event is designed for the social sciences data community at large including researchers, librarians, teaching faculty, students, and policymakers from around the world who are interested in the use of social science data. The first day will provide an orientation to ICPSR's services, including a tutorial on navigating our newly redesigned Web site. Other topics will include the American National Election Studies, minority voting behavior, and using election data in classroom instruction. The event is open to everyone, and will be conducted using GoToWebinar technology; you can watch each presentation from your computer without the need to download any software. A schedule of sessions is available, including links to the sessions themselves.
Help save the Library & Archives Canada
We've been tracking this story since this spring when the Depository Services Program of Canada (DSP) announced that, by 2014, it would, “no longer be producing, printing, or warehousing hard copies of publications.” Well it's much more than no longer printing govt publications. As BoingBoing notes:
Canada's national archives are in trouble: they've undergone a $9.6M cut, with more to come. The collections are being sold off to private collectors, many outside of the country. Now the Documentary Organization of Canada has weighed in: "Lisa Fitzgibbons, Executive Director of the Documentary Organization of Canada (DOC), succinctly states a case for continuance of sustainable funding of Library and Archives Canada."Please go to Save Library & Archives Canada (hosted by the Canadian Association of University Teachers!) to learn more about the issues and take action to save the Library & Archives.
Bringing data to the public
Here are some really useful tools and projects that make data more useful and understandable. They are winners of the Knight Foundation "data challenge." "The winning projects go well beyond collecting data to unlocking its value in simple and powerful ways, so journalists can analyze numbers and trends, and communities can make decisions on issues important to them."
- Six ventures bring data to the public as winners of Knight News Challenge, Press Release, The Knight Foundation (Sep 20, 2012).
- Safecast: Creating a community of citizen and professional scientists to measure and share data on air quality in Los Angeles and other U.S. cities. The air quality effort is inspired by Safecast's success in providing radiation data following Japan's 2011 nuclear disaster.
- LocalData: Providing a set of tools that communities can use to collect data on paper or via a smartphone app, then export or visualize the data via an easy-to-use dashboard. The city of Detroit has used the tools, created by Code for America fellows, to track urban blight.
- Open Elections: Creating the first freely available, comprehensive source of U.S. election results, allowing journalists and researchers to analyze trends that account for campaign spending, demographic changes, legislative track records and more. Senior developers from The Washington Post and The New York Times lead the project.
- New Tools for OpenStreetMap: Launching tools that make it easier for communities to contribute to OpenStreetMap, the community-mapping project used by millions via foursquare and Wikimedia and becoming a leading source for open, street-level data. DevelopmentSeed will create the tools.
- Pop Up Archive: Taking multimedia content - including audio, pictures and more - from the shelf to the Web, so that it can be searchable, reusable and shareable. Founded by University of California grad students and SoundCloud Fellows, the project beta tested by helping archive the collection of the independent, Peabody-winning production team the Kitchen Sisters.
- Census.IRE.org: Providing journalists and the public with a simpler way to access Census data, so they can spend less time managing the information and more time analyzing it and finding trends. The project is led by a senior developer from the Chicago Tribune in partnership with Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE).
Lots of interesting information and ideas at APDU 2012
The annual meeting of the Association of Public Data Users was held recently in Washington and it produced interesting discussions and insights into the current state of and future directions for official statistics. Here are links to presentations from the conference and an excellent overview of the conference by Peggy Garvin.
- Association of Public Data Users 2012 Annual Conference, The Future of the Federal Statistical System in an Era of Open Government Data, Agenda and papers. (September 12-13, 2012).
- APDU 2012 Conference Explores the Future of Federal Survey Data, by Peggy Garvin, InfoToday (September 20, 2012).