 The webinar today is brought to you by the North Carolina Library Association's Government Resources section. Today's presentation is Making Peace with the United Nations Data presented by Lisa DeLuca, who is the liaison librarian for the School of Diplomacy and International Relations. She received her MLIS from Rutgers University as currently an MPA student at State Hall. Her research interests include helping students and faculty to upgrade their research output with data visualization. Like Linda said, I work with our School of Diplomacy and International Relations here at Seton Hall. Seton Hall is a private university in South Orange, New Jersey. We have an undergrad population of about 6,000 and a graduate population of about 6,000. 120 of those graduate students are diplomacy students. Many do stay on from undergraduate to get their masters. So that said, we get a lot of reference questions and we do a lot of research consultations about UN resources. Seton Hall University Libraries is also a depository library for the UN. And we've done a number of different things to highlight that collection. And I'm sure for everybody on this call, data is becoming a bigger part of your collection, whether it's open access data or data sets that you're purchasing for faculty. And we know that so much information is available on the web, but in my experience, locating, you know, different agencies for the UN or different, I'll call them data repositories has been a bit challenging. So the goal of this presentation today is to just give you a high level overview of where to find this information, where to find the data sets, where to find the metadata. And then also just give you some basic tools for navigating reference interviews with students and faculty. This first slide. I love this image. It's from a Millennium Development Goal Progress Report. And that in itself is a database on UN Data Explorer. But to start, taking it from the top, undata.org, it's a repository of databases where you could find everything from commodity statistics, financial statistics, OECD data, and World Health Organization data. There's a growing number of databases here. And the second bullet, undata explorer is a component of the first, but it's not always easy to find unless you use the word explorer in your search terms. What is great about UN Data Explorer, and this is definitely one site you want to mark down, is that it includes complete data sets, sources, meaning what agency or program of the United Nations provide this information. And then also the information is listed by topic. So this is a great resource because students may come to you with a topic in peace and security, but they may not know what indicator they're looking for or the particular name of a data set. Thirdly, the UN Statistical Division has a website called unstats.org. That supports the Department of Economic and Social Affairs, and you can get all the division information on this website. So we'll talk about that a bit more in depth. Also for trade data, there's ComTrade, and they have a new interface where you can download the data with statistics from 1962, that's annually, and also monthly trade statistics. And then I also put the link for country data. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but I thought this was a good place to get us started. Also, when researching the United Nations, we all stumble into the alphabet soup dilemma where we may not know what an agency stands for. We may be overwhelmed with acronyms. So this glossary is a great list for you of different programs and specialized agencies like the World Bank, the IMF, UNESCO that work with the UN. Talking about the UN Statistical Division, remember that is different than UN data. Here are just some examples of different types of data that you could find in the statistical databases. Okay, demographic yearbook, the joint oil data initiative. If you go in there, you can get a breakdown of gas versus oil production rates by country. The Millennium Indicators Database, that's pictured to the right, and you see all the, this is a current initiative of the UN that is actually channeling into the strategic, I'm sorry, the sustainable development goals. And you'll see these listed here and you can look at this information by country. Those are just some of the databases. And again, the statistical databases are listed and as we talk more about the agency websites, those are often contained under the heading of resources. Data standards. Across UN data and UN stats, I tried to put together some high level information of what's available. You'll get country level data, data series. There's a link to metadata, the Data Mart info is where you can find information about metadata for any of the databases, including when updates will occur. The sites are generally user friendly. We're not going to get into specific data mining today, but that would certainly be a great next topic. Tables, charts, and reports are available in many different formats. You can download to an Excel file and into something that's called the BEYON 2020 format that seems like that is becoming a standard for large public and private institutions. Usually you can download up to 50,000 records. Again, that will vary with the agency and there could be a fee if you want to download larger amounts of data. And like I mentioned, if you go to an agency website, for example, UNICEF, you may not see publications or databases or statistics listed, but you can find resources and generally statistical information is available in there. And what I've found is that the lines are blurring between what's a publication, what's a database, what's a data set. So this is another slide that you definitely want. This can be one of your main takeaways besides finding the UN data explorer for a reference consultation. When you're approached by students or faculty, these are the four items that you can ask them to help locate what may or may not exist. Right? Often I'll get students, upperclassmen researching a senior seminar topic and they're looking for a data set that may not be published or may not exist and will have to get creative and combine two different types of data to help answer their research question. Initiative. Are they looking for a specific initiative such as the strategic development goals? The agency. Do they know the UN agency that they are researching? Indicator. Obviously, there's thousands of indicators contained within all of these databases that could range from literacy to trade statistics. And then topic. If they need more guidance, you know, you can certainly help them broaden their search to see what category of UN information they might be looking for. And I'm going to give you some more information about that in a minute. So this last bullet about intermingling search terms. We found that students often need a reminder or just need to be updated on what's the current search terminology in this area. And if you tell them to add data repository or the word data set to their search or raw data, that can help them get to the right agency's website. Additionally, if you use the word infographic, the UN produces so many great infographics that they put out on Twitter that help visualize what's happening in a particular area, let's say Syrian refugees or world hunger. That may also lead you to data about an initiative or a topic. This is just one example of agency information. Again, we talked about UN statistics. This features indicators in the middle of the page you see ranging from international trade to commodities to maritime transport. Here is the link to that agency. There's great information about all of the indicators. And you can see on the left that this site shows you reports, tables, chart in the data center. But then there's also country profile information. And the image on the right is one of the least developed country reports. Those are published annually by the UN. And as we're educating our students here at Seton Hall, we're really trying to show them the link between resources we have on the shelves, resources available online, and how the data in those resources makes them come to life and can help illustrate the UN's advancement on a particular initiative. A moment ago we talked about broadening a search for data by topic. The UN library in New York has an amazing staff of librarians and an amazing set of research guides that they've put together. I put a link to their guides. It shows you the topics at a high level. And then they also have an ask feature on their website where you can submit a question directly to the librarians. And we use them as a depository library. I'm often going to them to make sure that I've got my basis covered for a research question, whether it's for UN documentation or statistics. So I wanted to make sure everybody had their information. So we're talking about statistics, data sets, data mining eventually that maybe you will help your faculty with. They may be also starting to do some text mining. I think everybody's seeing that as a trend with our subscription resources. To look for UN documentation, there's the link to the official document search system, which probably a lot of you are familiar with. A lot of our faculty are also interested to know what is digitized because they're doing historical research about the General Assembly. And here are links. These are links for the depository libraries. So it shows the status of the digitization program. These documents are being digitized and in six different languages. So it gives you a breakdown of what is digitized by language. So those are also good resources, especially if you have students or faculty that want to do some text mining. Also, most of the UN publications I would say from the mid-90s onward are online. The agencies are also very good about using Twitter for updates. So again, you can go to that data mart to see updates, but also Twitter. And I'm going to give you a few UN sites to check out. As we all may get more data increase, we don't want to forget that we need to teach the students how to cite data. So this is, I pulled this from Owl Purdue. So this is just an example of how you would cite data sets or graphical data from a map or an infographic. Also related to United Nations data is data visualization. There's many more sites available. This is just one example, Comtrade, which is the trade statistics database has an amazing visualization site that shows you all kinds of work that's being done in conjunction with other universities. There's a link to work they're doing with Harvard, and I would urge you to check this out and just see what is possible for your students and your faculty. Many of you would agree that some students are afraid of data. They might be intimidated if they haven't procured a large data set or manipulated the data. So we've done some programming here at university libraries to try and make data less scary for them and more interesting and also to incorporate data visualization into that. So one example is that the UN every year has a World Statistics Day. It was on October 20th this year. So we invited faculty from the School of Diplomacy, the Departments of Political Science, Psychology and Math. And it was a very casual program where each faculty member set up, they just had a laptop and they had data visualization sites in their respective disciplines. And the students rotated around. Many of them were graduate students and they were able to see how data is used in different areas. And it was a great cross-pollination opportunity for the faculty because we know everywhere they're very busy. They're working on their own research and do not have a lot of time to see what kind of research other departments are working on. So this was a very successful event. Some of the students commented that the faculty really brought the data to life and the students were less intimidated by working with data. And so that was one program that we did. And we're also looking for other opportunities for graduate student outreach as we feel that they, upperclassmen or the graduate students, are going to be the most likely consumers of the data. Staying current, the three Twitter sites that I follow are UN Library, UN Data and UN Stats. And I feel like they do a great job of backing each other up. You can see in the upper right corner for UN Data, they're talking about ComTrade updates, updates to Energy Stats. So this just may enlighten you about new information that's available, resources maybe that you hadn't considered for your students and faculty before. But these are great and they often provide a lot of great infographics that I often share or reuse in a lip guide. Finally, I have some additional resources. We have our own UN Research Guide. The UN Library in Geneva has a terrific guide about statistics. And that same guide has statistics by theme. That's the last link on the page, that long link there. But that's the UN Geneva Library. And these other two links are from the UN Library in New York. And they also will show you different, give you links to the databases where you can pull the data from. This is a great, I hope you find a useful summary of resources when you get UN questions or are asked for research consultations. So we have a question, what would be the most expeditious way to get a general assembly voting record for a particular country? Voting records go to the, I'm going to go back and show you the site for the Dag Hammers-Gold Library. I would go here. There should be an option for voting record. If you wanted them from pre-1993, you can look on that list of digitized materials. Or you can check the ODS. There's just so many resources that are tied into the UN all over the world. I think the New York Library has done a great job of streamlining that for users. The next question. Thank you, Deborah. Do you have advice on locating date ranges for data sets? I find that students are sometimes interested in historical data that can be tricky to find. The first thing I would do is go to the UN Data Explorer and things are laid out pretty well about what date ranges are contained in the data set. And then if something was unclear or you didn't see what you were looking for, I would write to the agency. They usually have a statistical contact. I've done that a few times and they've been really great about getting back and answering questions. Another comment. Getting a lot of trade data requests. That's great. You want to go to ComTrade and you can look at even some of their visualization tools. But ComTrade would be great. You can also check World Bank, OECD, even IMF to see how the different types of data may overlap. Okay. Tracing a particular, next question. Tracing a particular country's position at the UN over time. I would start at the country profile link that I gave you. Or you could go to the voting records on a particular topic. That's how I would start with that. Yeah. We also do a lot of work with Model UN students. We bring the high schools here. We did a, the diplomacy school did a teach-in a few weeks back for the sustainable development goals. It was great. They brought in students from local high schools. We created a research guide for them. And thank you very much, Lisa, for going over all of this. This is great. Definitely some links I've been copying down from my Model UN students. Great. Great. I'm glad.