Documentation of the data publications | Reports using the public library data

US Public Library Data from US Government Agencies

The U.S. government through various agencies has been involved in the compilation of library data since before The Office of Education published the legendary 1876 publication: Public Libraries in the United States of America, Part 1 [common title: 1876 Report.] IMLS—and the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) before it—continue an old tradition..

The publications here were collected from a number of sources. Most came from the NCES Website over time. It is a curiosity of working with library data that publications with data and reports about libraries derived from those data tend to disappear—in the old days to musty library shelves but these days, often, the memory hole. One might suppose that librarians who house, organize, and archive the world’s publications might treat their own data similarly but that is not the way it is. As someone whose research interest in libraries often involved analyzing trends and that interest required longitudinal data that were not easy to assemble, I because acutely aware of the problem when I first assembled the Gerould Data. Moreover, government agencies often do not archive data for very long. I was also a former Webmaster at a federal agency, there was also the worry about having obsolete information which might mislead someone. In any case, this Archive has copies of digital publications that in many cases took effort to locate and also the cooperation of many people.

When this work began on what would become PLDF3,, public library data for 1987-1991 were no longer on the NCES site and, as indicated, came from other sources, largely from Kim Miller then at the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science (NCLIS) who had collected almost everything I needed for this work when I arrived at NCLIS. At the time NCLIS was responsible for working with NCES and providing a library perspective to the effort as a part of its policy role. In the end, there was one missing diskette and pleading emails sent to the community had one email reply from Libby Law, LDC at the South Carolina State Library who had kept a 5 1/4" diskette. I had a drive to read it. And here we are.

Similarly, a number the older data publications such as documentation and reports had gone missing and ferreting them out took some time and effort. Early NCES publications that had been scanned—mostly by the good folks at NCES—and were sent to me are also included here.

As mentioned, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has taken over managing the collection of the public library data and state library data. There is a page for IMLS’s Public Library Survey effort and one for the State Library Administrative Agency survey (SLAA) which will have current information on this series. Publications about this latter type are not currently included in this Archive. Those data presented a daunting set of problems that frustrated attempts to recompile them.

The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR,) a part of the Institute for Social Research, is located on the University of Michigan Campus. ICPSR maintains an archive of social science data. A number of files of library data in the PLDF3 file came from ICPSR, which processed them on behalf of NCES. When I was looking for the early years of the FSCS data, these were available on the ICSPR site and I collected them. I also discovered other data on other types of libraries, particularly historical academic data files and these data are available here, also. A spreadsheet lists all the files from ICPSR.

November 30, 2022
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