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Counting on statistics

It's amazing how often the really difficult research questions can be addressed by referring to dry, boring, numbers. Do you need to know trends in an industry? How successful was the government's initiative to fight illiteracy? How many regions of the world experienced drought this year as opposed to five years ago?

As is the case with most challenging questions, a good searcher will have a sense that SOMEONE must be collecting this information; the hard part is figuring out just who that someone is. Fortunately, OFFSTATS can often point you to the right source.

OFFSTATS, Official Statistics on the Web, is a tremendous resource for anyone looking for reliable information sources. In fact, it defines "statistics" fairly broadly; there are pointers to a database that tracks the largest arms-producing companies around the world, data on the electricity-generating capacity of an entire country, and the amount of molluscs captured from French fisheries.

This gem of a research source is maintained by the University of Auckland Library. OFFSTATS consists of briefly-annotated links to sources of free statistical information from official or semi-official sources -- including government agencies, the United Nations, the World Bank, and non-profit organisations ranging from the Australian Automobile Association to the Uzbekistan Centre for Economic Research.

You can browse for subject-specific sources that span multiple countries (refugees, patents, economic growth, or climate, for example), and you can look up sources that are country- or region-specific.

Note that this is not a searchable database -- you cannot type in "Greenland and unemployment" and get the answer (current Greenland unemployment is ten percent). Rather, you would use this as a tool to find where the answer is likely to be found (in this case, Statistics Greenland.

As Chris Sherman described in his Web Search Pacific workshops, this is one of the tools for finding invisible web content, since many of the sources in the OFFSTATS database are themselves databases or other content that is not easily crawled by search engines. All sources are English- language, which is both a bug, if you are looking for sources in the original language, and a feature, if you want pointers to reliable statistics from Nepal and you cannot read Nepali.

OFFSTATS has been in existence since 1998, and it continues to be a well-maintained, reliable, and stable tool for identifying official statistics.

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