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

[Mark M England]

Hi,

Certainly more needs to be done, and there is no comprehensive discovery tool,  but these would be the more impactful ones I think of:

CESSDA (Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives)
Data Citation Index
Data Repositories Open Access Directory
Datamed.org
Dataverse
Google Dataset
re3data.org
Dimensions
OpenAire
Eu Open Data Portal
Data.gov
HealthData.gov

Mark England
Head, Collection Management
University of Utah Marriott Library
Mobile Phone: 701-212-8492
Email: mark.england at utah.edu



From: Eril-l <eril-l-bounces at lists.eril-l.org> On Behalf Of Melissa Belvadi
Sent: Tuesday, February 22, 2022 11:48 AM
To: ERIL-L listserv <eril-l at lists.eril-l.org>
Subject: [Eril-l] resources to help students find free datasets across the curriculum?

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<mailto:mbelvadi at upei.ca>


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