DPLS News January 1993 What's This?? More Junk Mail?? Well... no. Welcome to the Data and Program Library Service's Newsletter. We hope that you find this publication informative. If you are not familiar with the DPLS, we are the primary campus-wide clearinghouse for the acquisition, documentation, information referral, storage and access to machine readable data files. We are also the campus representative of the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, the world's leading repository of data used for secondary analysis in the social sciences. We hope to publish this newsletter twice per semester, and to include in it information about data and other resources available at the DPLS. In addition,we will bring to your attention resources available outside of the Madison campus via exciting tools such as the Internet. At the data library we can assist you in analyzing data needs, identifying available data for use or purchase, acquiring and making data available for use, as well as providing some technical assistance. The collection includes data files in the areas of demography, economics, political science, sociology,education and health sciences. Our services are free. We invite you to visitus and become acquainted with our collection and services. New Acquisitions The DPLS has recently installed a user workstation with a 486 PC and a CD-ROM drive, which is networked with the Social Science Micro-computing Lab (SSML). Library users needing statistical data from CD-ROMs may now use the workstationto do their own extracts using software such as SAS or SPSS available from theSSML via their Novell network. The DPLS has recently acquired several CD-ROMs that can be used on our workstation; these include the National Longitudinal Surveys of Labor Market Experience youth database as well as the NLS "old cohort" databases, and the International Monetary Fund's International Financial Statistics database. All three of the aforementioned CD-ROMs contain their own extraction software. Inaddition, we have the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, 1968-1988: Respondent andNon-Respondent Files on CD-ROM. We have also received on 3-1/2 inch floppy disks an English language version of the public use file of the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP). The first wave of the GSOEP, collected in 1984 in the old Federal Republic of Germany--WestGermany--contained 5,921 house-holds. The most recent wave (1991) containsdata for 6,699 households, which includes the data collected from the EastGerman subsample that was added in 1990. The majority of the DPLS data holdings are on 9-track, 2400 foot magnetic tapes, which must be read on mainframe computers. In recent months we have received many new data sets written in this format, including the following: National Education Longitudinal Study, 1988: First Follow-up (1990). The follow-up data for the student component of the NELS 1988 provides the first opportunity for longitudinal measurement of the 1988 baseline samples, and also provides a point of comparison with high school sophomores from ten years before, as studied in High School and Beyond, 1980: A Longitudinal Survey of Students in the United States. American National Election Study: 1990-1991 Panel Study of the Political Consequences of War/1991 Pilot Study. Part of a time-series collection of national surveys fielded since 1952 designed to present data on American's social backgrounds, enduring political predispositions, social and political values, evaluations of candidates and opinions on public policy. The panel portion of this collection focuses on the consequences of war, with the first wave conducted prior to the outbreak of hostilities in the Persian Gulf, and the reinterview taking place several months after hostilities ended. Bureau of Health Professions Area Resource File 1940-1990, (ARF) and Area Resource Training File 1967-1991, (ARTF). The Bureau of Health Profession's Resource Files are county-based summaries of secondary data from a wide varietyof sources that are useful to health analysts and other researchers investigating the nation's health care delivery and health professional training systems. Other Recently Acquired Data National Longitudinal Surveys of Labor Market Experience Youth Cohort, 1979- 1990, Workhistory Data, 1970-1990, and Mature Men Cohort, 1966-1990. (CA-005) Cultural Democratization in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics: Moscow Oblast Survey, 1990. (SA-518-001) Campaign Expenditures in the U.S. 1989-1990: Report and Financial Activity (RFA) data. (KE-010-001) Charging and Sentencing of Murder and Voluntary Manslaughter Cases in Georgia, 1973-1979. (SJ-035-001) County Statistics File 4 (CO-STAT 4). (AC-011-004) Current Population Survey, May 1991: Multiple Job Holding and Work Schedules. (AH-005-071) Survey of Consumer Finances, 1983. (CA-037-001) Energy Crisis Behavior and Attitudes in the United States, Feb. 1977. (DA-007-001) Energy Crisis Attitudes and Conservation Behavior in the United States, April- May 1980. (DA-007-002) National Medical Expenditure Survey, 1987 various files. (QG-015) Health Interview Survey, 1980: Health Insurance Supplement. (QG-008-003), and National Health Interview Survey, 1986: Health Insurance Supplement. (QG-008- 022). ICPSR News For the last thirty years the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) has served as the central repository and dissemination service for machine-readable social science data in the U.S., and as a major training facility in basic and advanced techniques of quantitative social analysis. Through our membership in the ICPSR, DPLS users have access via the Internet to the Consortium Data Network (CDNet). CDNet offers users the ability to conduct subject-level searches on over 6 million variables contained in 30,000 machine-readable files in nearly 2,500 study titles. For selected studies, searchingon actual question text is available. Ask a librarian if you are interested in doing a search. The ICPSR's Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Research offers a comprehensive, integrated program of studies in research design, statistics, data analysis, and social methodology. Beginning in late June, the program schedule is partitioned into two four-week sessions, with instruction organized in lecture, seminar and workshop formats. For more information, see the DPLS staff. Reference Sources The DPLS houses a wide range of data-related publications and other reference works. These include the Panel Study of Income Dynamics Newsletter, the National Longitudinal Surveys of Labor Market Experience NLS Update, various Sage publications, and numerous catalogs of data repositories such as the National Centers for Education and Health Statistics, the Bureau of the Census, and the National Technical Information Service. We also have catalogs from foreign data archives in Germany, Netherlands, Australia and the United Kingdom. The Internet Corner Like many of you, we enjoy discovering *neat* stuff available on the Internet. Following are a few finds that could be helpful to social science researchers: EconData, Economic Time Series Data, including the Flow of Funds account, Foreign Direct Investment accounts, Labor force data, Consumer Price Indexes, and much more, from the University of Maryland. FTP to info.umd.edu, login anonymous, and cd to /info/EconData/Instructions to get a user's guide and a table of contents. The PENpages Bulletin Board, access via Telnet: psupen.psu.edu, Login: pnotpa. Contains the International Food and Nutrition Database, and MAPP--the national Cooperative Extension Family Database. Allows searching of full-text articles and research abstracts via subject keywords. Project Cork collection on alcoholism and substance abuse research. Telnet address: lib.dartmouth.edu, no password needed, type SELECT FILE CORK to access database. Searches on bibliographic citations with abstracts and index.