Meeting the needs of economic and financial data users

Heather McMullen
Social Sciences Data Librarian
Harvard University

Where can I find the monthly stock price index for France back to 1856?
The Gini coefficient for 20 countries?  Economists as well as other
researchers from a variety of disciplines have an insatiable demand for
economic and financial data, preferably as a time series in electronic
format.  Faculty members expect access to expensive financial data
retrieval systems at their desktops.  Economics undergraduates must obtain
"real-life" data for analysis in a class project or thesis, yet the data
retrieval process can consume a significant amount of time before the
analysis has even begun.  How are Data Centers and Libraries to cope?

This talk will explore new user expectations for economic and financial
data, and how these expectations differ from those of traditional users of
social science data centers.  Many issues arise in building support
services for economic and financial data, including collection
development, license negotiations, staff training and IT challenges.  The
service model at Harvard University and the relationships between various
library units and the Harvard-MIT Data Center will be discussed.

There will be an overview of several standard providers of economic and
financial data, including commercial vendors, inter-governmental
organizations and U.S. government data.  Special attention will be given
to strategies for developing expertise in economic and financial data
reference.