Finding Government Data

I want to start by saying that librarians are amazing! They know so much about so many things. If you haven't taken up the opportunity to sit in on a workshop or go talk to a librarian, do it!

Today, I attended a workshop at USC titled "Finding Government Data for Social Justice." While I have used the US Census (https://www.census.gov/), the American Community Survey (https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/), and the California Department of Education (https://www.cde.ca.gov/) to access data, this workshop helped to teach me a few additional places and reports to look for.

• For general governmental data, check out congress.gov
• Your university (if you are affiliated with one) or the local library might also have "Proquest Congressional." SEarch for that as well. 

Since I work in the field of education here are a few additional tips for my ed colleagues:

• National Center for Education Statistics: https://nces.ed.gov/ 
• Digest of Educational Statistics: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/
• The Digest has a useful report titled "The Condition of Education" that is produced annually: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/ 
• The U.S. Department of Education: https://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/landing.jhtml?src=image 

Many of my students could really use these sources to help contextualize their studies, so I'm excited to share these resources with them.

I also love sharing search tools and tips with my students. A great little tip I learned today for Google searches is to ask for .gov websites. To do that, enter your key word(s) and then type site: .gov.

Another Google search tip that I found helpful: inurl: [keyword]. This will allow you to find sources that have the keyword within the URL.

Happy data browsing!