DPLS News November 1993 Go With Gopher! The University's WiscINFO system offers faculty, staff and students access to atremendous number of worldwide, as well as campus-based, information resources.Included is information about Inter-university Consortium data sets availablethrough the Data and Program Library Service. If you enter WiscINFO's Gopherserver and choose the menu option `Library Catalogs and Services' you will seean entry for DPLS. Under the entry for `Holdings of the ICPSR' several optionsare provided, including information on recent updates to data serial collections such as the American National Election Studies, Census data, the Surveys of Income and Program Participation, and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. In addition, search capability of the ICPSR Guide to Resources is provided. It allows you to do keyword-level searching of titles, subject headings, and abstracts of ICPSR data, and provides full descriptions of the files that result from your searches. We encourage you to try out the information presented in DPLS *gopher-space:, and to let us know if it is helpful. Remember that, via our membership in the Inter-university Consortium, the DPLS can obtain any of the data files described in the ICPSR Guide to Resources for you, free of charge. What's New at ICPSR? As many of you know, every summer the ICPSR sponsors the Summer Training Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Research, held on the campus of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. In past years a comprehensive, integrated program of studies in research design, statistics, data analysis and social methodology has been offered. Emphasis is focused on those courses and subjects that are not normally integral parts of the curricula of ICPSR member institutions. In early 1994 the DPLS will receive information on the courses that will be offered in the upcoming Summer Program. There is often limited enrollment, so we encourage you to check with us if you are interested in attending any of thecourses. In addition to the small stipend that the DPLS can offer to one student who wishes to participate in the program, several courses make available special stipend support for students who show evidence of an intellectual commitment to the particular substantive area. If you are interested in exploring the 1980 and 1990 Census Public Use Microdata Samples (PUMS) 5-Percent and 1-Percent Samples, the DPLS can make available to you a service offered by the Consortium for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) called Explore. Explore is a tool for exploratory data analysis of the 1980 and 1990 PUMS files. It allows the user, in real time, to prepare custom crosstabulations and descriptive statistics from the rectangularized data. Queries to Explore involve the analysis of over 2.5 million records, generally in less than 10 seconds. This amazing speed is accomplished through the use of a loosely-coupled parallel processing computing system. If you are interested in using this new tool, please come talk to the library staff. Future CIESIN plans include the development of Extract, which will allow users to prepare subsets of PUMS data and download them to their home system. Government Resources on Education Data The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) provides a number of free products and services for researchers. The questionnaires used for the National Longitudinal Study of 1972, the Schools and Staffing Survey, the National Education Longitudinal Survey of 1988 and other studies are in the public domain. They may be copied, modified, used in whole or in part, for free andwithout asking permission or receiving authorization from NCES. These questionnaires undergo extensive development and validation. All are reviewed and revised by experts to maintain their validity and reliability. The National Data Resource Center (NDRC) was established to provide state education personnel, educational researchers and others with special statistical tabulations and analyses of data maintained by NCES. If you need more information about NCES, call (800) 424-1616; for NDRC call (202) 219-1364, or feel free to talk to library staff. New Data on CD-ROM National Longitudinal Survey of Labor Market Experience (NLS) Old Cohort Databases (2nd release). This disc contains 360 megabytes of data and documentation plus search/extraction software for the four original cohorts: Older Men, Mature Women, Young Women and Young Men. 1991 data were added to the Young Women cohort. For the 1990 NLS of Older Men ten new variables from the supplementary death certificate data collection on causes of death and age at death have been added. Corrections to an additional 32 other income, asset, industry, occupation and class of worker variables were also made. National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) Workhistory, 1979-1991. These data include variables detailing respondents' weekly labor force status, usual hours worked, job characteristics, periods of unemployment, gaps in tenure with a given employer, as well as a series of summarative labor force variables from January 1, 1978 through 1991. This disc is equipped with new software that allows researchers to easily link, select, and extract the 7,000 variables present in this complex data set. Other recently acquired CD-ROM titles are: Schools and Staffing Survey, 1987-1988; National Postsecondary Student Aid Study, 1989-1990; and United Nations Statistical Yearbook (Beta version). A CD-ROM workstation is available to users in the library. Sign up in advance to reserve a time slot. New Data Acquisitions Unless otherwise specified, the following datasets reside on 9-track magnetic round tapes. Documentation is shelved in the library by the DPLS call number following each citation. From The National Technical Information Service The following two datasets are in SAS transport file format: National Institute of Mental Health. Epidemiologic Catchment Area Study Public Use Data, Waves I and II, Household and Institutional Data, 1980-1984. (QG-022-002) U.S. Department of Labor. Employment Opportunity Pilot Project (EOPP): Employer and Household Data Base, 1979-1981. (CA-046-001). From The Inter-university Consortium ABC News/Washington Post Poll, July 1992. (LA-069-001) ABC News/Washington Post Poll, June 1992. (LA-071-001) ABC News Women's Issues Poll, July 1992. (LA-070-001) ABC News/Washington Post Race Relations Poll, May 1992. (SM-016-001) ABC News/Washington Post Los Angeles Beating Poll, April 1992. (SM-017-001) ABC News Angry Voter Poll, April 1992. (KB-034-001) ABC News/Washington Post Poll, December 1992. (LA-072-001) National Black Election Panel Study, 1984 and 1988. (KB-024-002) U. S. Department of Justice. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Uniform Crime Reporting Data [United States]: County-Level Detailed Arrest and Offense Data, 1990. (SJ-029-002) U.S. Department of Commerce. Bureau of the Census. Survey of Income and ProgramParticipation (SIPP), 1988 Panel: [Waves I, III, IV, V, and VI]. (CA-043-004through 009) U.S. Department of Commerce. Bureau of the Census. Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), 1990 Panel: [Waves I-VI]. (CA-043-010 through -015.) U.S. Department of Commerce. Bureau of the Census. Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), 1991 Panel: [Waves I, II and III]. (CA-043-016 through-019) Parnes, Herbert S. and Ohio State University. Center for Human Resource Research. National Longitudinal Surveys of Labor Market Experience, Youth Cohort: 1979-1991. (CA-005-032). The INTERNET Corner Many readers of this publication may already subscribe to electronic `list' discussion forums (called `listservers' in BITNET parlance). Many of these listservers provide timely and often incisively informative messages pertaining to the subject at hand, as well as give users the ability to query a largegroup of colleagues and other interested spectators about important issues. We'd like to bring a few to your attention, if you are not already familiarwith them: Listserv Methods provides a communication forum for social science research methods instructors. To subscribe send an e-mail message to `listser@unmvma.unm.edu' that contains in the body of the message the command:subscribe methods `your name'. Listserv POR is a very active new discussion list that concerns itself with public opinion research. To subscribe send an e-mail message containing the command subscribe por `your name' to the address `listserv@gibbs.oit.unc.edu'. Listserv H-pol is an international forum for the discussion of political history worldwide. To subscribe send the command subscribe h-pol `your name' tothe address `listserv@uicvm.uic.edu'. Other listservs sponsored by H-net (history on line) include H-urban (urban history), H-women (women's history), H-ethnic (ethnicity and immigration), H-labor (labor history) and H-rural (rural and agricultural history). Listserv Stat-l is a well established discussion list that provides a wealth ofinformation about statistics interpretation, use and instruction. To subscribe,send e-mail containing the command subscribe stat-l `your name' to `listserv@mcgill1.bitnet'. Messages on Stat-l are archived on WAIS at source `stats-archive.src', and may be accessed via Gopher as well. If any of the terminology used in this section about listservers is confusing to you, we suggest you pick up one of the many books currently available on the Internet (we like Ed Krol's book The Whole Internet, published by O'Reilly andAssociates, Inc.) and read the section about listservers. Warning: not only canlistservers be addictive, they can innundate you with a welter of irrelevantmail! Having Trouble Sleeping at Night? FedWorld is a project established by NTIS to provide users with access to hundreds of Federal Department and Agency information sources. These sources include bulletin boards, public mail forums, White House and other news bulletins, and Federal jobs listings. You can access it via modem by dialing (703) 321-8020, or by telneting to fedworld.gov. When you first connect to FedWorld you will be asked to *sign up: and create an account for yourself by providing your username and a password.