[Eril-l] resources to help students find free datasets across the curriculum?

[Kathleen Folger]

Hi Melissa,

Google created Dataset Search <https://datasetsearch.research.google.com/> to
help researchers find freely available online datasets. I remember looking
at it when it first came out a few years ago and wasn't particularly
impressed. But, that was very early days, probably 3 years ago, when it was
still in beta testing. It's been out of beta for a couple of years now.

If that doesn't do the job, the University of North Texas has a
libguide on finding
datasets. <https://guides.library.unt.edu/datasets/search-engines>

-Kathleen

On Tue, Feb 22, 2022 at 1:48 PM Melissa Belvadi <mbelvadi at upei.ca> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Does anyone know of any free or commercial-subscription databases that
> help students find raw datasets to use in their papers/projects, across the
> curriculum?
> They could be large research datasets associated with a specific faculty
> research project/publication, or sets coming out of government agencies
> (hopefully not just the US), or NGOs/intergovernmental agencies, or any
> other reliable producers of raw datasets.
>
> So far I am under the impression that so much of this is freely available,
> but so widely scattered all over the Internet, that we could really use a
> comprehensive, multidisciplinary finding tool.
>
> The closest I've found so far is ICPSR, which is along the idea I have in
> mind, but not nearly comprehensive enough and also totally US-centric.
>
> There seems to be some effort in this regard specifically for biomed data,
> especially from the NIH, but I'm looking for something truly
> multidisciplinary, like a Google Scholar or Academic Search/OneFile
> Academic for datasets rather than books/articles.
>
> I think this may be to the 2020s what videos were for academic libraries
> 20 years ago - something on our periphery that needs to be given the same
> quality of discovery/access tools as we do for books and articles, and now
> videos.
>
> So far what I can find is mostly Libguide type of advice with a handful of
> links - we would never try to make a libguide as our only discovery tool
> for our books, and maybe it's time we provide datasets with a similar
> serious search index. Or have we, and I just don't know about it?
>
>
> Melissa Belvadi
> Collections Librarian
> University of Prince Edward Island
> mbelvadi at upei.ca
>
>
>
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