Celebrate Love Data Week!

What is Love Data Week?

Love Data Week is an international celebration of data. This week was created to promote data discovery, use, protection, sharing, and preservation, specifically in everyday life to inspire communities to use data and was established to bring change that can make a difference. These changes come in a variety of forms including policy,Love Data Week environmental, or even social change. Love Data Week occurs every year around Valentine’s Day. This year it runs from February 13th through the 17th and the theme is Data: Agent of Change. The focus is on helping both new and experienced users find data training and resources that could assist them in bringing attention to issues that they care about. You can stay connected and up to date with Love Data Week by using and looking for #LoveData23 across all social media platforms. ICPSR or the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research is the host organization for International Love Data Week. A full list of the events being offered can be seen on ICPSR’s Love Data Week “List of Events” page.

What is ICPSR?

ICPSRICPSR includes more than 750 academic institutions and research organizations around the globe. ICPSR primarily provides training in “data access, curation, and methods of analysis for the social science research community.” Along with this, they help to maintain a data archive of more than 250,000 files of research in the social and behavioral sciences with 21 specialized collections of data in an array of subjects. This data can be used by the public who can contribute their own data as well. ICPSR also provides educational resources to help teach about data and provides courses through their Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Research in statistics, data analysis, and quantitative research methods. 

Find Data

If you are interested in finding data to use from ICPSR you are in luck! ICPSR has an entire webpage dedicated to finding data and offers helpful tips and suggestions to make this process easy. Users can search the datasets using keywords and can sort through results using several different filters including subject terms, data format, and time period. Along with searching, users can browse data by subject term, when data was released, by most popular search terms, and by the most downloaded datasets. A majority of these datasets can be downloaded for use or analyzed online and all information for proper citation of this data is provided. 

Gears with different types of communication inside
Pixabay

Data Management and Curation

Aside from providing datasets, ICPSR also works to curate data. Data curation is a process that can add value and meaning to data as well as help to preserve it. ICPSR does this through organizing, describing, and enhancing data to be used by the public and to give the public information for interpreting data. To learn more you can visit ICPSR’s “Data Management & Curation” web page.

Catholic University Libraries

If you are interested in learning more, see our Digital Scholarship guide.

Useful Links

U.S. Government (data.gov)

Google Dataset Search

The Open Data Handbook

Love Data Week- National Library of Medicine

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