After attending the IRE and NICAR Computer-Assisted Reporting Boot Camp last year my head was swimming with all the stories I planned to work on with my newfound expertise. I returned to the newsroom of the small southern Minnesota daily where I work walking a little taller, buoyed by my sudden trans- formation into a CAR expert. I carried a list of no fewer than 20 CAR stories I planned to work on, but with a special section looming, I decided to use my new powers for that assignment.

The section-Spring - Ag Update- one we do every year. I usually struggle to come up with good agricultural stories because it is not my beat. I consulted my list from the boot camp to see if I thought of anything while the iron was hot down in Columbia, Mo. And there it was: farm accidents. That would be just the topic to call on my new CAR skills as well as provide our readers in this farming region with an important and interesting topic.

I decided to keep it simple in my first attempt at a full-fledged CAR story. I started with a Google search of farm accidents in Minnesota. I am no stranger to using the Internet for searching for data, but I quickly dis- covered I would need to employ some of the Boolean search techniques picked up at the boot camp. The infor- mation I found initially was not in a form I could download and analyze.

While I was able to use some of the informa- tion from the initial searches later for background and expert opinion, it was not what I needed to get the start I wanted: accident statistics. Those Boolean search tactics I learned at the boot camp are what eventually got me the statistics, because even the most logical places I searched, such as the Farm Bureau and Minne- sota Extension Web sites, had articles using the data I wanted but only as it pertained to their narrower, specific purposes.

The deeper searching took me to the University of Minnesota Agricultural and Health Safety Program where I was able to find a link to the accident and fatality data I needed. I was excited to have finally unearthed the gold I was mining for so I could get it into a Micro- soft Excel spreadsheet and work it over. There was a catch, however: the data was all in Adobe Portable Document Format. Normally this would require a lot of manual entry and a great deal of time, but now I had new tools.

I remembered pdftotext, a program we used in the lab that converts tables in a PDF into a fixed-width text file that can be imported to Excel. I downloaded the PDF accident files, fired up my boot camp CD with pdftotext on it and con- verted them all to text. I opened the text in Excel and, using my boot camp skills once again, cleaned it up into a nice piece of data that I could easily sort, filter and compare.

(For a step-by-step tutorial on installing and using pdftotext, visit www.ire.org/training/nettour/pdf/ PDFTOTEXT.pdf) Once I had the data in Excel I used techniques picked up at the boot camp to compute average ages, median ages and to count the total number of ac- cidents. I was able to separate the ac- cident victims by sex, age, county and type of accident. I could have sorted by month the ac- cident happened, but it is well known in this farming community that harvest season is when most accidents hap- pen, so I left that out.

I also was able to access expert analy- sis on the Internet to verify what I found in my research as well as extension educators and farm bureau sources to help provide more information. One thing my CAR work on this story pointed out is that farm safety education efforts are paying off. The number of accidents and deaths went down in the past couple of years. This is especially true for children. I also discovered that our county, Martin, has one of the highest accident rates in the state.

However, more than anything else, this is because we have many more farms than other counties. This was a small and simple story but it accomplished several things. First of all, it built up my confidence in using what learned at the boot camp. I found I could come up with a more complete, useful story in a relatively short amount of time simply using the tools and techniques gathered there. It really increased the credibility of IRE and NICAR and its staff when the things that seem to work so easily in their controlled lab also worked for me when I got back to the little news- room in rural Minnesota.

Second, this story got my managing editor on board. He liked what I did and how I was able to use the boot camp experience to make the paper better. Following this story he allowed me to share some things with the rest of the newsroom during a staff meeting. Just as Brant Houston, the executive director of IRE and NICAR, said would happen, I am now the CAR expert at the Sentinel. I have helped other reporters use CAR methods in their stories and have taught them to use them them- selves.

One reporter covering a school administrator contract issue was able to access documents online and find resources that broke the real story for her. Since this story, I have done a three- part series on bridge safety in our town, county and a neighboring county (I told you my editor loved this stuff). I have gathered five years' of county and city budgets and city salaries and am in the process of converting them into useful formats.

This is another instance where the things learned at the boot camp, as well as the IRE and NICAR staff's willingness to help has continued to pay off. My editor asked me to put together a binder of sources that could be used by the newsroom to do basic CAR work. That project has turned into a CAR library with books we have started ordering from IRE, as well as our own sources. These will be available for any- one, allowing other writers' experience sto be accessed by everyone.

I have talked with our publisher and he is strongly considering getting another computer to use strictly for setting up permanent databases for reference and also getting more CAR training for the newsroom staff. We are a smaller daily, like so many others with little or no training budget. Because I attended the boot camp on a small-news organization fellowship, at least one newspaper and several report- ers are better for it.

And at least a couple of CAR evangelists have been born. Contact Dave Smith by e-mail at dave@fairmontsentinel.com