Contribute your files to database library
By David Herzog, NICAR and Missouri School of Journalism
Journalists hungry for high-quality data have turned to the IRE and NICAR Database Library for more than a decade.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, the Database Library acquires data from government agencies and provides it in useful formats for journalists and journalism organizations. The library staff, directed by Jeff Porter, processes the data and often fixes problems in the data so customers can focus on analyzing it for news stories. The staff also creates documentation that helps journalists understand the data better.
The number of Database Library offerings has multiplied many times since the early days. Journalists can obtain data on a wide range of topics - transportation, public safety and business, to name a few - for low fees on a sliding scale. Smaller news organizations pay less than the bigger outfits.
When the Database Library started more than a decade ago, its initial offerings were databases that journalists had used for news stories and then donated. It was like a journalists' co-op for data.
We want to revive that practice and ask you to donate your databases - the raw files you obtained from government agencies - to IRE and NICAR after your stories run. We are mainly interested in national databases. Send us your data, along with any documentation and notes about quirks that you discovered. We'll take a look at the data to see if it's something we would like to add to our collection.
Jeff is leading this push to add more data. You can contact him at jeff@ire.org if you have data that you'd like to share.