There’s no shortage of domestic statistics and data resources on the Web. American Fact Finder, Bureau of Economic Analysis, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Data.gov are just a few of many sites that are supported by the federal government that provide a broad range of statistical resources.
STATS America is a website that supplies economic statistical information geared towards those researching community-based economic development in the United States. STATS America compiles publicly available and proprietary data, and then provides a user interface that generates reports and maps with requested economic and demographic information.
One useful value-added service STATS America provides is the means to easily compare geographic areas e.g., comparing Pierce County, WA with Bernalillo County, NM. It also provides analysis through its Innovation in American Regions and Measuring Distress tools, which measure innovation and distress respectively through a combination of component indexes (details of calculations are available on the site).
STATS America is a service of the Indiana Business Research Center at Indiana University funded by the U.S. Commerce Department. A video recording of a webinar I recently attended providing more information about the service and its uses is available here courtesy of Know Your Region.
Ben Tucker, Social Sciences Liaison Librarian
Check out Micro by Michael Crichton and Richard Preston, from the library’s Popular Reading Collection. It’s as exciting as Jurassic Park, in a miniature-world Gulliver’s Travels sort of way!
