Minutes for
Data Services Committee
Meeting Minutes
Monday, October 20, 2014
11:00-12:00
Main Library 428
Members:
 Karen Hogenboom, chair
□ Jenny Johnson
 Joanne Kazcmarek
 Dawn Owens-Nicholson
□ Carissa Phillips
 Beth Sheehan
□ Sarah Shreeves
 Sarah Williams
 Christie Wiley
 Maryalice Wu
 James Whitacre
 = present
1. Notetaker: Dawn agreed to take notes.
2. Announcements:
a. Karen and Maryalice were recently on a conference call with data people from the
Graduate College, DMI, and about 50 others (mostly administrative/BANNER
database users and some research data users). The subject of the call was creating
consistent policies for the use of all the little pools of data that exist in various
colleges and departments as well as the large administration stores of University
data. It may or may not have anything to do with the library, and the talks are just
in the beginning stages.
b. Sarah Shreeves is leaving the University in a couple of months to take a job in
Florida. So someone new will be in charge of the Scholarly Commons. Who will it
be?
c. Christie recently attended a Sage/ACRL webinar called “Supporting Research
Methods in the Library” and gave us a report. It was mostly a question and answer
session between data librarians at Toronto and Capella Universities and various
students and faculty. Some answered questions were about things like: datasets,
text mining, lit reviews and research designs. It was not a presentation on the role
of libraries in research. Christie will share her notes with us on uofi.box.com.
3. Evaluation of data purchase applications (All of these applications may be found in our
uofi.box.com folder.):
a. Maryalice and Beth reported to us on a request for the American Hospital Assn’s
Annual Survey of Hospitals. It costs $6800 annually for a single non-transferable
seat, and it can’t be obtained from any other source. Beth noted that some
California school (UC San Diego?) has some sort of school-wide license for the data,
but we don’t know how much it cost or what its terms are. Karen is going to try to
wrangle with the AHA to see if we kind arrive at more favorable terms, otherwise,
we will probably have to decline this request.
b. James and Sarah S worked on a request for the Prowess database of financial
information about Indian business firms. James reported that it requires the user
to download some software to access the database over the internet. Mara Thacker
in the IAS LIbrary has already tried this database in a free trial that has since expired.
It looks like it costs less than $5,000 for an annual university-wide license that is
limited to 100,000 hits on the database.
c. Karen & Christie reported on a request for some DataQuick real estate transaction
data for a couple of counties in California. The cost is within our range and once we
have the data, we own it and there are no restrictions on number of users. We have
successfully dealt with DataQuick before. Karen says that the same data (and much
more) is also available from a RealtyTrac database that some other group is already
in negotiations to purchase that data. Karen will look into perhaps contributing
some $$ to that venture. She has already checked that the RealtyTrac data will
suffice for the requester.
4. Assessment of Data Purchase Program (if we have time): There was no time for this.
Meeting Adjourned!