“The first essence of journalism is to know what you want to know.” John Gunther once wrote. “The second is to find out who will tell you.”
Gunther, who died in 1970, was one of the 20th century’s most ambitious and prolific journalists: He knew what he wanted to know, found out who would tell him, and told the rest of us in Inside Europe, Inside U.S.A., Inside Latin America and a half dozen other best-selling books that he liked to call “political travelogues.”
Gunther never got around to writing the book on Washington, D.C., as he’d planned, but anyone who wants information from the nation’s capital would do well to follow his advice. These days, however, Gunther’s “who” is likely to be a “what” — namely, a computer. The federal government is deep into the database business, and its computerized storehouses of information are among the biggest anywhere. What’s more, they’re generally among the cheapest to use, which is good news for information-seekers accustomed to paying $100 an hour or more for the data they download.
In many other cases, private companies are turning a profit by taking information that’s been collected or compiled by the federal government and reconfiguring it as a proprietary database. Consider, for example, the Congressional Record, which until a few years ago was available only on paper. If you wanted to find out whether Senator Whopper had anything interesting to say about the proposal for a “National Cheeseburger Week,” your only option was to thumb through the newsprint pages of the Record in hope of hitting pay dirt. No more. Thanks to a couple of enterprising database vendors, the Record is now available online, which enables anyone with the ways and means (a personal computer, a modem, and a few bucks) to instantly retrieve Senator Whopper’s latest comments on the cheeseburger question. Another vendor offers each day’s edition of the Record on a floppy disk.
In recent years the Federal Register (the bureaucracy’s journal of record) and the Commerce Business Daily (the government’s procurement digest) have gone electronic, too, and it’s probably just a matter of time until individual and corporate taxpayers can go modem-to-modem with the Internal Revenue Service to download any publications or forms they need.
Because the federal government collects, analyzes, and disseminates information on virtually every subject imaginable — from acid rain to fatal traffic accidents — new databases are being mounted so quickly that no one, inside the government or out, can keep track of them. Add to that the government’s growing number of electronic bulletin boards (interactive, computer-based libraries that frequently include databases). The U.S. Department of Commerce, for example, operates an “Economic Bulletin Board” that gives users direct, one-stop access to the latest news releases and economic data from the Bureau of Economic Affairs, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and other agencies.
“The feds are just now trying to get a handle on how many bulletin boards there\ are out there,” says Tom Cox of the National Technical Information Service, which runs one of the federal government’s biggest databases. “A bulletin board goes up with some kind of frequency almost daily.”
Let your fingers do the walking
If you’re wondering just what kind of information is out there, here’s a rundown of more than a dozen databases that have either been created by the federal government or rely heavily on government-generated data. Nearly all of them are available through one or more of the major gateway services: BRS Information Technologies, Dialog Information Services, and Dow Jones News/Retrieval.
AgeLine. This database, created by the National Gerontology Resource Center of the American Association of Retired Persons, covers all aspects of aging — from demographics to discrimination —and includes abstracts of government documents as well as descriptions of federally funded research projects.
Agricola. If what you need to know has anything to do with agriculture, this is the place to start. Agricola, the mammoth database of the Agriculture Department’s National Agricultural Library, serves up references to more than a million documents, from monographs and journal articles to government reports and books.
Cancerlit. This database, created by the National Cancer Institute in cooperation with the National Library of Medicine, contains more than 400,000 citations (with abstracts) for published materials.
Catalyst Resource on the Workforce and Women. Businesses are paying a lot more attention these days to such issues as affirmative action and sexual harassment as well as day care, parental leave and other employee benefits for working parents. This database, created by the Catalyst Information Center, provides citations (with abstracts) for relevant published materials — from newspaper and magazine articles to government reports.
Disclosure Online Database. If you’ve ever thought about going to the Securities and Exchange Commission for some information, here’s a bit of advice: Don’t. (As federal-document rooms go, it’s Casablanca.) Either send someone else to get what you need or dial into Disclosure’s database, which enables you to extract a vast array of financial data and other basic information on more than 10,000 public companies. The folks at the Disclosure Information Group do most of the dirty work by scouring 1O-K, 20-F, 10-Q, and 8-K reports, as well as proxy and registration statements. So whether you need the names of a corporation’s officers and directors, a list of its subsidiaries, or a five-year summary of its financial performance, why not let your fingers do the walking?
Disclosure/Spectrum Ownership Database. If you want to know who owns how much of America’s 5,000 or so largest public companies, this database will give you a running start. In addition to some of the descriptive corporate information in Disclosure’s other big database, it contains detailed stock-ownership figures for insiders, institutional investors, and individuals who hold at least 5 percent of the shares in a company.
Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC). If you need to know something about education, chances are that ERIC —the U.S. Department of Education’s bibliographic database — can point you to it. ERIC contains nearly a million citations that cover everything from studies and technical reports to speeches and unpublished manuscripts.
Federal Research in Progress. This database, developed by the National Technical Information Service, offers descriptions of ongoing federal research projects in a wide variety of disciplines.
Government Printing Office Monthly Catalog. Adlai Stevenson once joked that newspapers separate the wheat from the chaff and print the chaff, and it sometimes seems as if the federal government does likewise. This database, unlike its conventional counterpart, lets you efficiently search through hundreds of thousands of government documents and pinpoint those that might be useful — whether you’re interested in agriculture, business, engineering, the humanities, law, medicine, the physical and social sciences, public policy, or anything else that falls under Uncle Sam’s umbrella. It’ll even tell you how to order them from the Superintendent of Documents.
HUD User Database. Plenty of folks are looking into the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development these days, and now you can, too. This database contains abstracts of reports produced by HUD’s office of policy development and research, as well as information on other housing-related issues, from economic development to energy conservation.
Index to U.S. Government Periodicals. Think of this one as the electronic equivalent of the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature for the nearly 200 magazines, journals, and other periodicals published by federal departments and agencies. This database from Infordata International indexes each article by subject and author.
MEDLARS Online Network. MEDLARS may be the federal government’s most mind-boggling database (it’s actually a collection of nearly 20 databases that cover subjects ranging from chemistry and toxicology to medical history and population). Created and maintained by the National Library of Medicine, MEDLARS is best known for MEDLINE, a database that contains references to more than five million articles and other documents on medicine, health care, and allied topics.
National Environmental Data Referral Service (NEDS). This database, started in 1983 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, indexes all kinds of environmental data held by public and private sources throughout the world — including files that were collected as early as 173 B.C. Although you can’t extract the actual data, NEDS will tell you who has the information you want, howto get it, and how much it’s likely to cost.
National Technical Information Service Database. If you’re interested in government-sponsored research and development, you can’t afford to overlook the NTIS database. It contains more than a million citations (with abstracts) for research reports, studies and other publications issued by government agencies at the
federal, state and local levels.
Patdata. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office launched a drive to automate its records more than a decade ago, and Patdata is the result. The database contains basic information for most patents issued since 1975. In addition to listing the patent number, title, date of issuance, inventor, and any assignee, each record also includes the cited references to U.S. and foreign patents. That makes it possible to trace the historical development of a patent back to 1836, the year that U.S. patent law became effective.
PIERS ( Port Import/Export Reporting Service). PIERS, a database recently introduced by The Journal of Commerce, provides detailed information on all shipments arriving or departing through the top 47 U.S. ports (product descriptions, the name and location of the U.S. consignee/exporter, the country of origin or destination, quantities, weights, and so forth). But be forewarned that this incredibly useful database is also incredibly expensive.
Data, data, everywhere
If you haven’t yet found the database of your dreams, take heart. The federal government is the world’s largest developer and supplier of electronic databases, and somewhere within the bowels of the bureaucracy you’re likely to find exactly what you need. Here, for example, is just a small sampling of some of the other subjects covered by federal databases: abandoned mine land, adverse reactions to prescription drugs, agricultural pests, bilingual education, bird banding, coastal engineering, crop and livestock estimates, federal procurement contracts, foreign living costs, maps and charts, minority business development, occupational health and safety, product-related injuries, small business, and smoking and health.
While many of these government databases aren’t yet commercially available, the departments and agencies that have developed them generally will do searches either free of charge or for a modest fee. The rules of the game, however, are rapidly changing. “It used to be that the government would provide the raw data and that the private firm would do the
‘value-adding,’ ” says Tom Cox of NTIS. “But in the last six or seven years that whole line of demarcation has become extremely blurred. It has gotten to be the proverbial sticky wicket.”
Indeed. As most commercial vendors realized some time ago, the federal govern- ment can’t copyright the information in its databases and can’t prevent others from reselling it at a profit. So if you yearn to be in the information-retrieval business, Uncle Sam might make the ideal partner.
Wired to Washington
“The first essence of journalism is to know what you want to know.” John Gunther once wrote. “The second is to find out who will tell you.”
Gunther, who died in 1970, was one of the 20th century’s most ambitious and prolific journalists: He knew what he wanted to know, found out who would tell him, and told the rest of us in Inside Europe, Inside U.S.A., Inside Latin America and a half dozen other best-selling books that he liked to call “political travelogues.”
Gunther never got around to writing the book on Washington, D.C., as he’d planned, but anyone who wants information from the nation’s capital would do well to follow his advice. These days, however, Gunther’s “who” is likely to be a “what” — namely, a computer. The federal government is deep into the database business, and its computerized storehouses of information are among the biggest anywhere. What’s more, they’re generally among the cheapest to use, which is good news for information-seekers accustomed to paying $100 an hour or more for the data they download.
In many other cases, private companies are turning a profit by taking information that’s been collected or compiled by the federal government and reconfiguring it as a proprietary database. Consider, for example, the Congressional Record, which until a few years ago was available only on paper. If you wanted to find out whether Senator Whopper had anything interesting to say about the proposal for a “National Cheeseburger Week,” your only option was to thumb through the newsprint pages of the Record in hope of hitting pay dirt. No more. Thanks to a couple of enterprising database vendors, the Record is now available online, which enables anyone with the ways and means (a personal computer, a modem, and a few bucks) to instantly retrieve Senator Whopper’s latest comments on the cheeseburger question. Another vendor offers each day’s edition of the Record on a floppy disk.
In recent years the Federal Register (the bureaucracy’s journal of record) and the Commerce Business Daily (the government’s procurement digest) have gone electronic, too, and it’s probably just a matter of time until individual and corporate taxpayers can go modem-to-modem with the Internal Revenue Service to download any publications or forms they need.
Because the federal government collects, analyzes, and disseminates information on virtually every subject imaginable — from acid rain to fatal traffic accidents — new databases are being mounted so quickly that no one, inside the government or out, can keep track of them. Add to that the government’s growing number of electronic bulletin boards (interactive, computer-based libraries that frequently include databases). The U.S. Department of Commerce, for example, operates an “Economic Bulletin Board” that gives users direct, one-stop access to the latest news releases and economic data from the Bureau of Economic Affairs, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and other agencies.
“The feds are just now trying to get a handle on how many bulletin boards there\ are out there,” says Tom Cox of the National Technical Information Service, which runs one of the federal government’s biggest databases. “A bulletin board goes up with some kind of frequency almost daily.”
Let your fingers do the walking
If you’re wondering just what kind of information is out there, here’s a rundown of more than a dozen databases that have either been created by the federal government or rely heavily on government-generated data. Nearly all of them are available through one or more of the major gateway services: BRS Information Technologies, Dialog Information Services, and Dow Jones News/Retrieval.
AgeLine. This database, created by the National Gerontology Resource Center of the American Association of Retired Persons, covers all aspects of aging — from demographics to discrimination —and includes abstracts of government documents as well as descriptions of federally funded research projects.
Agricola. If what you need to know has anything to do with agriculture, this is the place to start. Agricola, the mammoth database of the Agriculture Department’s National Agricultural Library, serves up references to more than a million documents, from monographs and journal articles to government reports and books.
Cancerlit. This database, created by the National Cancer Institute in cooperation with the National Library of Medicine, contains more than 400,000 citations (with abstracts) for published materials.
Catalyst Resource on the Workforce and Women. Businesses are paying a lot more attention these days to such issues as affirmative action and sexual harassment as well as day care, parental leave and other employee benefits for working parents. This database, created by the Catalyst Information Center, provides citations (with abstracts) for relevant published materials — from newspaper and magazine articles to government reports.
Disclosure Online Database. If you’ve ever thought about going to the Securities and Exchange Commission for some information, here’s a bit of advice: Don’t. (As federal-document rooms go, it’s Casablanca.) Either send someone else to get what you need or dial into Disclosure’s database, which enables you to extract a vast array of financial data and other basic information on more than 10,000 public companies. The folks at the Disclosure Information Group do most of the dirty work by scouring 1O-K, 20-F, 10-Q, and 8-K reports, as well as proxy and registration statements. So whether you need the names of a corporation’s officers and directors, a list of its subsidiaries, or a five-year summary of its financial performance, why not let your fingers do the walking?
Disclosure/Spectrum Ownership Database. If you want to know who owns how much of America’s 5,000 or so largest public companies, this database will give you a running start. In addition to some of the descriptive corporate information in Disclosure’s other big database, it contains detailed stock-ownership figures for insiders, institutional investors, and individuals who hold at least 5 percent of the shares in a company.
Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC). If you need to know something about education, chances are that ERIC —the U.S. Department of Education’s bibliographic database — can point you to it. ERIC contains nearly a million citations that cover everything from studies and technical reports to speeches and unpublished manuscripts.
Federal Research in Progress. This database, developed by the National Technical Information Service, offers descriptions of ongoing federal research projects in a wide variety of disciplines.
Government Printing Office Monthly Catalog. Adlai Stevenson once joked that newspapers separate the wheat from the chaff and print the chaff, and it sometimes seems as if the federal government does likewise. This database, unlike its conventional counterpart, lets you efficiently search through hundreds of thousands of government documents and pinpoint those that might be useful — whether you’re interested in agriculture, business, engineering, the humanities, law, medicine, the physical and social sciences, public policy, or anything else that falls under Uncle Sam’s umbrella. It’ll even tell you how to order them from the Superintendent of Documents.
HUD User Database. Plenty of folks are looking into the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development these days, and now you can, too. This database contains abstracts of reports produced by HUD’s office of policy development and research, as well as information on other housing-related issues, from economic development to energy conservation.
Index to U.S. Government Periodicals. Think of this one as the electronic equivalent of the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature for the nearly 200 magazines, journals, and other periodicals published by federal departments and agencies. This database from Infordata International indexes each article by subject and author.
MEDLARS Online Network. MEDLARS may be the federal government’s most mind-boggling database (it’s actually a collection of nearly 20 databases that cover subjects ranging from chemistry and toxicology to medical history and population). Created and maintained by the National Library of Medicine, MEDLARS is best known for MEDLINE, a database that contains references to more than five million articles and other documents on medicine, health care, and allied topics.
National Environmental Data Referral Service (NEDS). This database, started in 1983 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, indexes all kinds of environmental data held by public and private sources throughout the world — including files that were collected as early as 173 B.C. Although you can’t extract the actual data, NEDS will tell you who has the information you want, howto get it, and how much it’s likely to cost.
National Technical Information Service Database. If you’re interested in government-sponsored research and development, you can’t afford to overlook the NTIS database. It contains more than a million citations (with abstracts) for research reports, studies and other publications issued by government agencies at the
federal, state and local levels.
Patdata. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office launched a drive to automate its records more than a decade ago, and Patdata is the result. The database contains basic information for most patents issued since 1975. In addition to listing the patent number, title, date of issuance, inventor, and any assignee, each record also includes the cited references to U.S. and foreign patents. That makes it possible to trace the historical development of a patent back to 1836, the year that U.S. patent law became effective.
PIERS ( Port Import/Export Reporting Service). PIERS, a database recently introduced by The Journal of Commerce, provides detailed information on all shipments arriving or departing through the top 47 U.S. ports (product descriptions, the name and location of the U.S. consignee/exporter, the country of origin or destination, quantities, weights, and so forth). But be forewarned that this incredibly useful database is also incredibly expensive.
Data, data, everywhere
If you haven’t yet found the database of your dreams, take heart. The federal government is the world’s largest developer and supplier of electronic databases, and somewhere within the bowels of the bureaucracy you’re likely to find exactly what you need. Here, for example, is just a small sampling of some of the other subjects covered by federal databases: abandoned mine land, adverse reactions to prescription drugs, agricultural pests, bilingual education, bird banding, coastal engineering, crop and livestock estimates, federal procurement contracts, foreign living costs, maps and charts, minority business development, occupational health and safety, product-related injuries, small business, and smoking and health.
While many of these government databases aren’t yet commercially available, the departments and agencies that have developed them generally will do searches either free of charge or for a modest fee. The rules of the game, however, are rapidly changing. “It used to be that the government would provide the raw data and that the private firm would do the
‘value-adding,’ ” says Tom Cox of NTIS. “But in the last six or seven years that whole line of demarcation has become extremely blurred. It has gotten to be the proverbial sticky wicket.”
Indeed. As most commercial vendors realized some time ago, the federal govern- ment can’t copyright the information in its databases and can’t prevent others from reselling it at a profit. So if you yearn to be in the information-retrieval business, Uncle Sam might make the ideal partner.
Adlai Stevenson Agricola Agriculture Department BRS Information Technologies Cancerlit Catalyst Information Center Catalyst Resource on the Workforce and Women Commerce Business Daily Commerce Department Congressional Record Databases Dialog Information Services Disclosure Information Group Disclosure Online Database Disclosure/Spectrum Ownership Database Dow Jones News/Retrieval Education Department Educational Resources Information Center ERIC Federal Register Federal Research Federal Research in Progress Government Printing Office Government Printing Office Monthly Catalog GPO HUD HUD User Database Index to U.S. Government Periodicals Infordata International John Gunther Journal of Commerce MEDLARS MEDLARS Online Network MEDLINE National Agricultural Library National Cancer Institute National Cheeseburger Week National Environmental Data Referral Service National Library of Medicine National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration National Technical Information Service NEDS NTIS Patdata PIERS Securities and Exchange Commission Superintendent of Documents Tom Cox U.S. Department of Agricultural U.S. Department of Commerce U.S. Department of Education U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development U.S. Patent and Trademark Office