Roper and the $1000 Sundae

Earlier this week, I went to one day of nearby library conference and I attended a session about public opinion resources. One of the presenters at this session was from Roper Center at the University of Connecticut which produces iPOLL, a database of the polls from every major survey organization going back to the 1930s. For me, watching the presenter demo iPOLL was like watching a chef make the $1000 sundae at Serendipity restaurant in New York City -- You salivate over the end product, but you know there is no way you can afford it.

Luckily for those of us who crave public opinion data but can't part with a silver spoon to pay for it, Roper has put some free resources on their website. One is their Topics at a Glance section which contains preselected iPOLL data on a variety of what they call "hot topics". So for example, you can get some recent numbers related to the public's confidence in the economy or education or Congress. Also you can find poll results on social issues like drugs or lifestyle information like following sports. It's not as robust as I might like, but you can't beat the price. In addition, Roper provides historic data on presidential approval for free. So if you want to know how Obama's high and low numbers compare to other presidents back to FDR, you can find out.

While I may never get to devour the $1000 sundae of public opinion, I think I can make do with the occasional free scoop that comes my way. After all, finding something wonderful for free, even if it is only a little bit of it, makes this librarian smile :-)

Searchable State Employee Salary Database

For those of you that know me, you can imagine me as a curious little kid. So when I was about four years old, I was learning about numbers and money so one night at the dinner table I blatantly asked my father how much money he made. The room went silent and my dad said it wasn't polite to ask that question. Well if my dad was a state employee in Maryland now I wouldn't have to go through the impropriety of asking. I can just find the figure online thanks to the Baltimore Sun.

As I was reading an article on the Baltimore Sun's website about how Gov. Martin O'Malley makes less than many University System of Maryland VIPs, I noticed a sidebar that invited me to search a database of all state employees' pay. I clicked on this link and discovered that I can search salaries by name. So now my neighbors, coworkers, and anyone else can find out how much money I make. As a librarian, I generally like information to be freely available, but this creeps me out a bit and seems like a violation of my privacy. If my census record must be kept confidential by law, why not my pay too? I can see the value of aggregate data and that should be available, but pay data on an individual, identifiable level just seems wrong to me.

JTA Jewish News Archive

A fantastic new news repository came online last week -- The JTA Jewish News Archive.

This free searchable database contains 250,000 news reports from JTA: The Global News Service of the Jewish People (formerly the Jewish Telegraphic Agency) from 1923 to the present. (The JTA organization is a not-for-profit media company similar to the Associated Press.)

One of the most significant parts of this archive is the JTA coverage on the Holocaust from the late 1930s and early 1940s because the bulletins shed light on what was actually known about the Holocaust during that time period. It would be interesting to compare coverage in the JTA news bulletins with coverage in secular news sources from around the world and see what the differences were.

You can obtain more information about the archive on the JTA site as well as through this YouTube video.

Where Does It Count? Census Data and the News

I am a self-described "news addict" so needless to say, I spend a lot time on news websites. In the last few weeks, I've noticed more and more news stories about population shifts on local papers' websites. For example, today in the Baltimore Sun, we have one about "white taggers" -- the people who have moved up I83 to Pennsylvania but haven't changed their license plates yet.

So what is the reason for all these demographic stories? Beginning this month, the US Census Bureau is releasing the data from the 2010 Census. You can see the release schedule here and given the schedule, it looks like we are going to see many more news stories based on Census data in the coming months.

As a researcher, I welcome all these news stories because they give us one more access point for Census data. Anyone who has worked with government information knows that it can be difficult, if not impossible sometimes, to find the data you need because they are often buried in a maze of hyperlinks on government websites. Also, even if you do find the right data, it's not unusual to encounter broken links and this too can make finding old data difficult. Thanks to the hard work of librarians though, news stories usually get stored in a searchable archive.

So 50 or 100 years from now it will probably be a whole lot easier to find out how many people moved from Maryland to York, PA between 2000 and 2010 using the Baltimore Sun news database than it will be to try and search a government website for that same data.

I guess the moral of the story is that if you are looking for Census data, it doesn't hurt to search the Census' website, but you may also want to check out the library's news databases like LexisNexis or the Baltimore Sun Historical too.

Researching Journalists' Safety

Between the story of the sexual assault of Lara Logan while she was covering the Egypt protests and the story that came out of China today about police intimidating ABC reporters in that country, the world seems to be getting tougher and tougher for journalists.

If you want to keep track of how reporters faring around the globe, there are a few organizations that can help you find this information:

• International News Safety Organization (INSI): A coalition of news organizations, journalists, and other support structures that try to provide a "global safety network" for reporters who are abroad. They have a good news feed about the latest dangers facing reporters abroad.

• Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ): Independent, non-profit started in 1981 that is devoted to press freedom. This organization keeps statistics on reporters killed or wounded on the job and provides information for journalists on how to be safe while abroad.

• International Federation of Journalists (IFJ): An organization that monitors press freedom and works for a free press around the world.
  

MyBestSegments

When you were creating an advertising or media campaign, did you ever come across the Nielsen Prizm market segments and wonder what the heck they were? What exactly makes "The Cosmopolitans" different from "Up-and-Comers," anyway?

On the MyBestSegments website you can get the definition of each of the 66 Prizm segments including where each segment is likely to shop and what each segment is likely to drive. Also, you can get basic information on what segments make up a particular zip code. To top that off, each of these components is free!

Polling Websites

Since this is an election year, we will undoubtedly see political news coverage turn again to poll numbers to help fill the news hole. If you want to see the data for yourself or want to learn more about public opinion in other areas, check out these sites:

• Real Clear Politics: This site compiles the latest numbers from all the major poling firms for the 2010 political races and Obama job approval.
  
• Gallup: Sometimes you want to know what the public thinks about an issue and this website contains publicly available polling data on the latest hot-button issues
• Pew Research Center: This non-profit research center's website often contains their polling data for issues that are in the news.
  

Guidelines for Reporters

Sometimes reporters need to cover sensitive topics, such as a suicide, and there may be some confusion about how that topic should be covered. Once again, research can come to rescue, if you know where to look.

Chances are, if you are faced with an ethical dilemma about how to cover a story, another reporter has faced a similar situation. Other newspapers' standards and policies for reporting can be a guide and journalism organizations, such as the Society for Professional Journalists, may also have ethical guidelines.

Also, foundations or research institutes may have guidelines as well. In a previous life I worked for Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania on a project that focused on improving news coverage of suicides. Previous research had indicated that many news reporters didn't realize (or didn't want to believe) that how they covered suicides (the wording that they used and the pictures that they showed) could impact whether or not "copycat" suicides would later be attempted. We worked with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention to create and disseminate media guidelines for suicide coverage that reflected the research. One thing to keep in mind when turning to interest groups for guidelines is to make sure that they are grounded in sound research and not just a ploy to get favorable media coverage.

The Newseum: A good physical and virtual resource

Last summer I visited the reopened Newseum in Washington D.C. for the first time and I was blown away. As someone who reads news religiously, I could have spent a lifetime in the building just taking in the exhibits and contemplating the impact that news has on our society.

Thus, I was thrilled when I later went back to the Newseum's website and saw all the great news resources that are available. Through this site, you can:

• See the front pages of newspapers from around the world
• Keep up with journalism news
• Get information on the first amendment of the U.S. Constitution (great for that upcoming informative or persuasive COMM 131 speech!)

So if you haven't visited the Newseum in person or virtually, I recommend that you do both.

Come on in -- The World Bank is Open!

Journalists writing international stories and the researchers who support them, rejoice!

It was just announced today that the World Bank is opening up its data archive and putting up a new website to house all of it. According to an article by Mathew Ingram of the business blog Gigaom, "The data at the World Bank site includes more than 2,000 indicators related to economic well-being and global development, including some that the agency has been accumulating for 50 years."

There looks to be a ton of great stuff in this archive. For example, you can find out how many patent applications were submitted by Bulgarian residents in 2008 and which countries have the highest life expectancy. On top of this, the archive lists the sources for the data so you know where all of it comes from. I can't wait to keep digging in this archive!

C-SPAN Library is here!

C-Span has put its video archives online. C-SpanVideo.org contains over 160,000 hours of footage and spans the last 23 years. Best part--it's free!

According to a New York Times piece, MSNBC Host Rachel Maddow compared accessing the archive to "being able to Google political history using the ‘I Feel Lucky’ button every time" and Ed Morrissey, a senior correspondent for the Hot Air blog said, "The geek in me wants to find an excuse to start digging." I couldn't agree more! This a treasure trove for anyone interested in political communication.

Who in the world is using what technology?

Ever want to know what the broadband penetration is in Iran or how what percentage of Brazil's population has access to a mobile signal?

Check out this website created by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a United Nations agency.

Select a county using the map or the pull down menu in the middle of the website and you can learn about telecommunications technology and technology policy in that particular country.

(Just in case you were wondering - less than one out of every 100 inhabitants of Iran has broadband and 90.64% of Brazil's population is covered by a mobile signal.)

Looking for some speech inspiration?

Dr. Michael Eidenmuller of the University of Texas at Tyler has created Speech Bank: a free online database with full-text, audio, and video of over 5,000 speeches.

So whether you're looking for the text of Elle Wood's speech from Legally Blonde or video of Obama's last State of the Union address, this is a great place to find what you need.

Intute: A portal for scholarly communication sites

It's worth taking a peek at Intute, a portal for scholarly websites in communication and other disciplines.

It was created by a consortium of seven universities in the UK and it looks like the Communication and Media Studies section has links to open access journals and research project websites from the various facets of the discipline.