Zach's News

Want $1000?  Check this out. You can access ICPSR via GALILEO here.

ICPSR has  cancelled the Nov. 18 webinar on new child care and early education information resoures, which we had announced previously.

Following is an announcement from ICPSR, the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research:

ICPSR is pleased to announce the official launch of the Online Learning Center (OLC).  The site is located at: http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/OLC/ and can be found under the Courses & Learning Tools tab on the ICPSR front page.

ICPSR’s Online Learning Center (OLC) supports quantitative literacy in the social sciences by providing an effective and reliable means of bringing data into the classroom. OLC tools were designed, built, and tested by teaching faculty.

Currently numbering 30 (with more added continually), our Data-Driven Learning Guides are designed for in-class presentation or as supplemental activities for students demonstrating a variety of types of data analysis and substantive concepts.  Available on-demand 24/7, DDLGs:

• Demonstrate core concepts using prepared data with missing data and weights accommodated.
• Avoid the hassles of software licensing, setup, and instruction.
• Are easily customized to your teaching approach and syllabus.
• Are appropriate as supplemental exercises or for in-class demonstrations.

Please share this with your teaching community.  We look forward to your feedback and suggestions via email, the OLC Blog, or the OLC listserv all available through the OLC website.

The link below is one example of the new and updated data sets in the ICPSR database, available via GALILEO here:

Longitudinal Data on Social Structure and Personality, Based on Interviews With a Random Sample of Men and Women Living in the Urban Areas of Ukraine in 1992-1993, and Re-interviews With a Subsample in 1996

The following announcement comes from ICPSR, which is available via GALILEO here:

The Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (provided to the Georgia Southern campus by Henderson Library) is pleased to announce the development of several managed email lists that are intended to serve both a broader and a more focused community within your institutions!

Why have we developed these? For some time now, we have received requests that additional individuals beyond the designated campus representative be enabled to receive general announcements about ICPSR developments. There have also been requests for targeted announcements regarding programs/projects including the Summer Program and the emerging Online Learning Center.

More information and sign-up for all of these lists can be found here on the ICPSR website: http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/ICPSR/org/lists/index.html

OLC-Announce

This list will carry announcements from ICPSR staff specifically related to the Online Learning Center and teaching with data issues. Announcements might include notices of new DDLGs or other teaching resources and tools added to the site as well as upcoming presentations of our teaching resources at professional meetings.

This list is available to the public.

Summprog-Announce

This email list will carry announcements specifically related to ICPSR’s Summer Program in Quantitative Methods. Announcements might include updates on particular courses or information on new courses or scholarships.

This list is also available to the public.

Kind regards,

-ICPSR Staff

Linda Detterman

Marketing & Membership Director

ICPSR

University of Michigan

734.615.5494

lindamd@umich.edu

Below is an announcement from ICPSR, which you can access via GALILEO for premium content, or directly for publicly available files:

1990-2006 versions of TIGER/Line Files are now available for download. The new Web site, TIGER/Line Files@ICPSR offers data no longer available online from the US Census Bureau. TIGER is an acronym for Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing and provides users with the appropriate data to prepare maps through geographic information system (GIS) software packages. As the Census Bureau states, “The TIGER/Line files are a digital database of geographic features, such as roads, railroads, rivers, lakes, legal boundaries, census statistical boundaries, etc., covering the entire United States. The database contains information about these features such as their location in latitude and longitude, the name, the type of feature, address ranges for most streets, the geographic relationship to other features, and other related information.” The cartographic information in these files reports on all counties and statistically equivalent entities in the United States as well as files for Puerto Rico and the Island Areas. Since its inception in 1988, the TIGER Line Files have been continually improved with updated address and more precise geographic data. Researchers use TIGER data to build shapefiles that contain geographic attributes for points, lines, or polygons and are used in a variety of mapping applications. Once the shapefiles are loaded into GIS software packages, researchers can input subject matter data, such as Census population and housing information, as overlays on the maps. ICPSR has the 1990 version of these files available as well as several versions based on Census 2000 information, including the most recent second edition files from 2006. Data for individual counties can be downloaded from special map or table interfaces on the Web site. Data for entire states may also be downloaded.