With war looming in Iraq and the demand for related local news stories rising a few months ago, we decided to look at which companies in the Carolinas benefited from military contracts.
We obtained the Federal Procurement Data System from the IRE and NICAR Database Library and imported it to Access 2000 for our initial queries. Because this database compiled by the U.S. General Services Administration contains all federal contracts with a value of more than $25,000, we needed to filter our queries to limit our results to Department of Defense contracts. Then we decided to omit contracts granted by the civilian Army Corps of Engineers since the story focused on military activities.
Now we were ready to explore the data two ways: for work performed in the Carolinas and work performed by contractors based in the Carolinas. We decided that it was more interesting to