Two questions to consider before beginning your statistical search:
- Who cares about or has a mandate to study the topic?
- Who has the resources and staff to collect data in this topic area?
Knowing the answers to these questions will help direct you to appropriate resources.
Look for information about the:
- File Format (HTML, PDF, Excel, text, etc...)
- Dates of Data (not the same as the publication date of the document or page)
- Sources of Data
- Contact Person
- Suggested Citation
- Availability of Documentation
- Data Use Limitations
- Anything special about the data?
Many agencies publish their statistics in PDF files that require Adobe Acrobat Reader.
If you are searching the web in general for statistics, be sure to use a search engine
that indexes PDFs. Google (www.google.com) and
AllTheWeb (www.alltheweb.com) are two
examples.
It is difficult to remove data from PDF format tables if you do not have the complete
Adobe Acrobat program. Tools designed for screen-reading browsers (such as the Adobe PDF
Conversion Form at (http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/access_onlinetools.html)
may be able to translate PDFs into HTML or plain text for you.
