Legal Studies Research Guide
Data Collections

Data collections or sets make raw statistical data accessible in catalogs or libraries on the Web. These collections contain numeric representations of facts or concepts in some formal organization suitable for communication, interpretation or processing by researchers. Social scientists use data sets frequently to generate new knowledge. Researchers manipulate the raw data with major statistical software packages, such as SPSS and SAS.

American Fact Finder
This set from the U.S. Census Bureau contains a variety of information from household income to ethnic and racial profiles of various groups across the country.

Archival Data Online Repository
The collection includes major surveys from a variety of distributors, U.S. government data, and locally produced archival datasets.

Data on the Net
Search or browse this listing from U. of California, San Diego of 873 Internet sites of numeric social science statistical data, data catalogs, data libraries, social science gateways, addresses and more.

Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research
Search for words or phrases in the title field, by investigator, by study number or in all fields of this huge collection of data sets at the University of Michigan. The University of Massachusetts Amherst is a member of ICPSR. Contact Dee Weber-Burdin at weber@sadri.umass.edu.

Networked Social Science Tools and Resources (NSSTAR)
NESSTAR Explorer is a tool to find data across organizational and national boundaries and for browsing and downloading both data and metadata.

LexisNexis Statistical
Statistical reports from federal, state and local governments, private organizations, and intergovernmental agencies; includes references to statistical tables from The Statistical Abstract of the United States, American Statistics Index, Statistical Reference Index, Index to International Statistics.

Virtual Data Center
An open-source, digital library of quantitative research data.