Datasets and Numeric Data Services

The Heard Library provides acess to several sources of data. The Data Services Librarian is available to assist Vanderbilt faculty, staff, and students in locating numeric data sets for secondary data analysis.

Through the Heard Library, Vanderbilt is a member of the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICSPR). Established in 1962 at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, ICPSR is the world's largest online archive of social science data. In addition to preserving and making the data sets available. ICPSR also offers training in analyzing social science data. For more information, visit the LibGuide for Finding & Using Data from ICPSR.

The Roper Center for Public Opinion is another source of social science data that is provided by the library. Access to the iPOLL database is available for members of the Vanderbilt community. This database offers searching at the question level for public opinion polls. In many cases, you will be able to download the poll and data with a few mouse clicks. To locate other public opinion data sets, you may search the Roper Center's catalog. Contact the Data Services Librarian for more information about Vanderbilt's access to the Roper Center's data.

While the Data Services Librarian can help you make sure you can open the dataset in a statistical software package, such as SPSS, SAS, or STATA, she does not provide statistical consulting or instruction in these software programs.

Sue Erickson, Data Services Librarian
Phone: 322-8096  E-Mail: Sue Erickson