Welcome to the Data and Information Services Center (DISC), comprising the former DPLS, the data services operations formerly housed in the Center for Demography and Ecology and the Center for Demography of Health and Aging!

What's New at DISC?

New weblog-based format for Current Social Science Research Reports (CSSRR)! These daily current awareness posts replace the e-mail subscription to the weekly reports in the fields of sociology, economics, and health. The content is the same, but the updates are more immediate!

See the latest edition of DISC News -- September 2009 (HTML) or September 2009 (PDF).

Who Cares About Federal Economic Statistics? and other recent data-related articles.

Free Webinar on The American Community Survey: Tracking How We Change with Multi-Year Estimates. The webinar will be held Nov. 18, 2009: 2-3:30 pm Eastern time. Reserve your webinar seat early; space is limited.

Cynthia M. Taeuber will provide best practices and guidance for using the multi-year ACS products. Experts from the U.S. Census Bureau will discuss the population controls and their relationship to the ACS multi-year estimates. There will also be an overview of the ACS website to show users where to locate key tools and documents to assist with the multi-year products. The webinar will assume participants have at least an intermediate level of knowledge of the ACS.

Labor Market Information Training Institute Webinars - a series of free one-hour webinars this semester on labor-market data:

• Green Jobs: Definitions and Analysis, November 17, 2009: 2-3 pm Eastern time
• Economic Impact Studies: Using Regional Input-Output Multipliers, December 9, 2009: 3-4 pm Eastern time
  

Check out our Internet Crossroads, providing searchable annotated links to social science data and information across the Internet. Featured new addition:

Madison Neighborhood Indicators Project
City of Madison (Wisconsin)
http://madison.apl.wisc.edu/

The Madison Neighborhood Indicators Project program, funded by the City of Madison and hosted by UW-Madison's Applied Population Lab, offers a single year of selected data indicators plus mapping capability, covering the city of Madison (Wisconsin) as a whole and 70 neighborhoods, also organized as 57 planning districts. Indicators for each neighborhood include a basic area & population profile, public safety indicators, health & well-being indicators, community action & involvement indicators, economic vitality indicators, and housing quality & availability indicators. Mapping and neighborhood-comparison tools are available on the site. Note that some indicators, particularly relating to health and family well-being, are suppressed at the neighborhood level due to privacy concerns. The project launched as a pilot in 2008 with 5 neighborhoods, and went city-wide in October 2009.

See other recent additions to the Internet Crossroads (last updated 22 October, 2009).

New: Updated information on Restricted Data at DISC.

Links to Country Statistical Yearbooks worldwide: a guide by DISC on the UW-Madison libraries website. 122 countries, and counting!

The DISC subscription to Unicon CPS on Web / Current Population Survey has been discontinued. Please see IPUMS CPS for an online data extraction service for the March Current Population Survey, 1962-2009.

Check out what's new at other selected data sites.