government shutdown – St. Thomas Libraries Blog

Finding Census Statistics during the Government Shutdown

I blogged last week about government sites that are down because of the partial government shutdown.

If your assignment can’t wait any longer, and you’re scratching your head about where to get government data and stats when so many websites are shut down, we do have some ideas for you! (We’ll keep this list updated as we hear more, too – so check back!)

The Wayback Machine (waybackmachine.org) has done a great job archiving in-depth versions of government sites – as opposed to just screenshots of homepages – so a lot of data can still be found via their site. It will not be the most up-to-date, nor will it be complete, but it is better than nothing!

The Minnesota Population Center, part of the U of MN, offers U.S. Census data from the decennial census back to 1850, as well as the American Community Survey (through 2011) and Current Population Survey through their National Historical Geographic Information System and Integrated Public Use Microdata Series.

These and some other great hints are published by the Pew Research Center – and more are continually being added by researchers across the country.

As always, if you have specific research questions, please don’t hesitate to ask an UST librarian – we are happy to help out!

October 10, 2013 by

Libraries, News & Events, Services

Federal Government Shutdown affects Research

It’s happened: the Federal government has shut down.

For those of you doing research today, you may start to encounter a screen that looks a lot like this one:

Because of the shutdown, many websites funded by the federal government are currently also down, including statistical organization websites, public sites, blogs, online surveys, and more. Many of them are used by UST researchers on a regular basis.

Below is a list of websites linked to on our subject guides that we currently know of that have been affected; we will try to keep it up-to-date with anything new we discover.

If you would like assistance finding alternative resources for your research, please feel free to contact any UST Librarian.

Resource	Status
American Community Survey	Shutdown
American Factfinder	Shutdown
Bureau of Labor Statistics (including Consumer Expenditure Survey)	Up, but not being updated
Census Bureau	Shutdown
Department of Energy	Up, but not being updated
Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC)	Website is down, but content is still available via the ERIC database (EBSCO-owned). No new data is being uploaded to EBSCO.
Fedstats	Shutdown
Library of Congress	Shutdown – Interlibrary Loan will also NOT be available from any federal library, which could potentially cause delays
National Center for Education Statistics	Shutdown
PubMed	Up, but not being updated
United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)	Shutdown
United States Geological Survey (USGS)	Main site shutdown; some critical subsites still live

Archived versions of these websites can all be viewed on the WayBack Machine (waybackmachine.org). Other options for alternative sources of information can be seen on this list compiled by the Pew Research Center.

More information about the shutdown and available government services can be found at USA.gov.

October 1, 2013 by