 She served as the research and instruction librarian for business and economics at Wake Farage University since 2004. She earned her MBA from the Weatherhead School of Management at Casewood Reserve University and her MLIS from Kent State University. Her publications include Reconceiving Entrepreneurship for Libraries, Collaboration and the Anatomy of a Conference and the Entrepreneurial Librarian Essays on the Infusion of Private Business Dynamism into Professional Service. She is currently serving as the chair of BLINK which is the Business Librarianship in North Carolina section of NCLA and she teaches LIBE 230 which is Business and Accounting Research Sources and Strategies in addition to ESE 305 Special Topics and Entrepreneurship. So really excited to have her here. She's presented for us before but never in this on this particular topic. Thank you for joining us. Pass it on to Mary. Good afternoon. My name is Mary Scanlon. I'm the business and economics librarian at Wake Forest University and today we're going to talk about the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Now I'm a business and economics librarian and so I have learned to love many of these government websites and the Bureau of Labor Statistics is valuable because it provides wonderful data. It's free. The data can all be downloaded into Excel. And the BLS is the primary source for much of the data that you'll hear quoted in newspaper articles, journal articles and a lot of the business and economics databases that we use. Sometimes it's convenient to return to the primary source where you can download long longitudinal data sets into Excel for your patrons. Why does this matter? Well, patrons who need data about the economy will find you here. So the agenda for today's webinar is to first place the BLS in the context of other federal government agencies. We're going to review their activities, the scope of the information covered at BLS and I will walk you through the steps to actually retrieve and download data. Learning outcomes for the webinar today wind up with the agenda. I want you to understand the breadth and scope of information reported by the BLS. I want you to be able to navigate to the data, find the tables and download to Excel and be able to navigate to the publications and download articles. Here's just a quick treat for any of you who forgot your middle school activities or daily civics lessons. The federal government has three branches, executive, legislative and judicial. And within the executive branch there are a number of departments such as the Department of Labor, Department of Education, Department of State. Within the Department of Labor we have the Bureau of Labor Statistics and that's where it agencies may also have statistics related websites within their departments but today we're going to focus on the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Here's their mission. Here's what you need to know. Their mission is to measure labor market activity, working conditions and price changes to collect, analyze and disseminate essential economic information. This is what the BLS does and we love them for it. Here's a list of topics covered at the BLS. Take a look. These are the main topical areas that we'll look at today in kind of a truncated version. So inflation and prices, pay and benefits, spending and time use, unemployment and employment, workplace injuries, productivity, international and some regional resources. Let's start with inflation. This is one of the main reasons people go to BLS is to look for the indicators of inflation and just the simplest way of thinking about inflation is to change in prices over time. What prices you might ask? Well, the BLS reports three different categories of price changes. Consumer prices, producer prices and import-export prices. And together the BLS feels that these three pillars of inflation reflect the health of our economy as well as putting us in the context of the global economy, where do our prices fit internationally? Consumer prices, obviously those are the things that you and I buy every day when we go to the store. Producer prices, that's what the companies who make the stuff we buy are paying for the raw materials and the input to the items that they make and sell to us. Some people would refer to producer prices as a leading indicator for consumer prices. If the raw materials for the television set that you want to buy go up, at some point the price for that TV set is probably going to go up. So producer prices, producer activity is a leading indicator for the rest of the consuming economy. Based on that, there are three different indexes for reporting inflation. The consumer price index also called the CPI, the producer price index called the PPI, and the import-export price index. The consumer price index is a measure of a market basket of products that will be paid for by an urban or suburban customer. You might ask, what's in a market basket? Well, it's just the regular stuff that you and I buy on a regular basis. Food and beverages, what do we pay for housing, apparel, transportation, medical care, recreation, education and communication, and other goods and services. So BLS people check the prices of this market basket geographically all across the US and they average these changes in prices and that gets reported as the CPI. Now, there is the basic CPI, which is all urban customers, all urban markets with these full baskets, but the BLS also reports it segmented geographically and by the individual elements of or categories really of the market basket and we'll look at that when we get to the website. In the section on pay and benefits, they report out employment costs, wages by area and occupation, earnings by demographics and industry, benefits and strikes and lockouts. So for instance, if you have a student doing a report on a particular industry, perhaps the student's doing a project in an entrepreneurship class and they want to know from an employer standpoint, what will it cost to ramp up as they employ people? You can use the employment costs along with forecasts to determine what will it cost to hire people or students who are starting to look for jobs, they can look at wages by area and occupation. So there are a lot of different ways students come at the information and can use this pay and benefits section. Spending and time use, they report the consumer expenditure survey, how much money does the average consumer spend by category of the market basket and the American Chinese survey. So when we read articles in the paper about the average American watches TV for blah blah hours per day, this is where it comes from. Now we're going to do two additional webinars about subsections of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and one of them will be a much more detailed look at the consumer expenditure survey which I find particularly helpful when I'm working with entrepreneurship students. Unemployment, before I show you unemployment data, I want to give you a definition of unemployment because unemployment isn't just being out of work. To be counted as unemployed, you must be out of work. You must have actively sought employment in the last four weeks and you must be available to work. So you can't be sick, you can't be out of the country or on vacation or other things. You have to be available to work and actively seeking employment. One of the things we saw in this recent deep recession was that the unemployment numbers got better but they got better because people gave up and just stopped looking for work. When people stopped looking for work, they're no longer counted as unemployed and that's an important consideration when thinking about the direction of unemployment trends. The other thing that doesn't show up in unemployment would be people who are working part-time who would really prefer to be working full-time or people who are underemployed. A librarian who has a master's degree in library science who is working as a waitress is employed but she might be underemployed and that's not counted in the unemployment numbers. So sometimes a little bit of methodology is important to understand what the numbers really indicate and how they can be used. So now that we understand what unemployment is, the three key pieces that you'll find in the unemployment section of the DLS website would be national unemployment rates, state and local unemployment rates and mass layoffs. And you might remember from the prior slide, they also had strikes and lockouts. So there's a kind of a different kind of unemployment information in those numbers. Employment numbers, people who are working, is reported by the DLS at various geographic levels, national, state, county and local, local being really metropolitan statistical area. It also reports employment by occupation and reports worker characteristics, age, education, gender. The employment section reports lots of other things but these are the key points that might drive you to that employment section of the DLS website. There's a section on workplace injuries that reports non-fatal injuries and illnesses as well as fatal injuries. So if you want to know how many people died in mining accidents or how many people were injured in, you know, whatever your industry is, this is where the data originates. This is the primary source. Productivity, you'll find labor productivity and costs reported by the DLS as well as some productivity research. For those of you who follow these kinds of things, you may recall that one of the impacts of the deep recession was unemployment didn't fall, people weren't hired back to work because companies put lots of technology to work. There were enormous productivity gains during the recession, which meant that companies didn't need to hire people. So they replaced some labor with assets and that was one of the off sheets. So productivity is reported here at the DLS. Internationally, DLS puts the United States in a global context by reporting international labor comparisons. So if you wanted to know how much a worker in a particular industry makes in the US versus another country, you can look at that. That would also give a company an indication where might they lower their manufacturing costs by looking at these international labor costs. And then this is where the DLS also reports the import-export price index. And this is a composite of both imports and exports, how did those prices change? This is the home page for the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It's a very busy page, so let's break it down. Up here in the front corner, upper right, you've got a search box. You could type in any topic like unemployment and you would get a list of all the places where either data or publications were listed there in the wealth of the search. Here you've got the menu bar for the various topical areas, data and tools, publications, economic releases, and there's a section for students. This is mostly aimed at grade school and high school students. And then beta has some great geographic detail in there right now. Below that are the most recent economic releases. So you can see a few days ago when I made these slides, productivity grows 2.5% in the second quarter. That's the annual rate estimate with unit labor costs growing at 0.6% and that was released on August 8th. We had a release on August 7th. Productivity rose in 39 of 54 detailed mining trade and food service industries. So these just roll in automatically like an RSS feed and down below you've got some earlier economic releases. And of course here you can read more and see older economic releases. Below that you've got some geographic information. You've got the latest products that were released and you can see this one is from here's one from New England and one from the Midwest. You can select products by state or products by subject. And obviously if they're in the product by subject there's a geographic segmentation available to you in that particular release. Over on the right hand side you've got monthly labor review which is a publication by the BLS. And they'll usually show you on a carousel about five articles. And you can click forward or on the live website. These will just roll to the others and you can click through and read those articles. Down below you've got the latest numbers and you've got a couple of icons. One you've got an RSS feed here so you can follow those economic releases if you like. You can just click on the number to see the actual data. If you click on the dinosaur you'll get 10 years of historic data. Or you'll get text related to or publications related to this particular data stream which is the consumer price index. Quick review, BLS collects, analyzes and disseminates data about labor market activity, working conditions and price changes and it provides both data and publication. Let's go to the live site. This is a homepage for the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Like we said you've got your search box up here. You've got your menu bar here and you can see under subjects there's a lot more on this website than I showed you in the slides. I just wanted to show you some top line items that were most interesting as opposed to just throwing everything at you but there's a lot here. Now let's take a look at what we might find in one of these subject areas. So I've clicked on consumer price index. You can browse it. There's a table of contents. Here are all the different sections on the page. Or we can just scroll down and you'll see you've got the latest numbers over here, right? And we can go here and look at 10 years of historical data. The pages are all set up on a template. So the format is the same although the content varies by subject area. So they all begin with announcements with the most current stuff they want to tell you about. They'll tell you what will be the next release. So the July CPI data will be released on August 19th at 8.30 a.m. Eastern time. They'll always tell you what's on this page and these links are all clickable so you can just jump down. You've got news releases which you can click through in different formats, HTML versus PDF and read a text description along with the data explaining what these different numbers mean. You've got a list of databases and we'll come back to this in a minute. But you'll see there are various sub segments of CPI data available in a number of different ways to get to that data. There usually is a calculator so if you want to make your own calculations you can do that along with other tools. Then you'll get a list of all the tables for the particular subsection you're in. And we're in CPI so we have a list of CPI tables. And you can see it's a pretty extensive list. And any of these can be accessed by clicking on the PDF. They also list department store inventory price index which I think is just fascinating. We collect that by month. Then we see all the CPI publications including CPI detailed reports, PLS handbook, notes on change consumer price index. We've got monthly labor review articles included in the publication section along with the CPI fact sheets. Understanding the CPI so if you forget what is CPI or what's in that market basket or how are these numbers collected. That's all located up in here. And then here's a section on how the BLS measures price changes in the CPI. So more methodology and sometimes that really matters. Frequently asked questions and special notices and then a contact up. So again lots here and the sections are pretty constant across various sections. Let's look at the various paths you can take to get to the data. So there are many ways to access the data table. The first one is by clicking on data tools up here at the top. And we'll look at that in a minute. But since we're in CPI let's look at the various ways to access data tables from within one of the subject areas. The two that I find most helpful are top picks and one screen. Top picks, pre-explanatory, most requested slides, one screen lets you select one variable but it also lets you select a geography. Let's take a look at top picks. So here's a list of top picks within the CPI subject area. All items and remember I said it was an index. That means that the CPI is compared to an average of the prices where 1982 to 84 equals 100. So today's CPI is indexed against that and is a comparison against the average prices from 82 to 84. But they've also given you older CPI data where 1967 was the base for the index. But we could also look at the CPI for all items, less food and energy or the inflation rate just for food and beverages, housing, apparel, transportation. So we can look at each of the segments in that market basket or we can look at the market basket minus certain more volatile items. Very often the Wall Street Journal and PR and some other news related places will talk about how inflation for consumer goods less energy or less food has been stable. That trend of an indication is particularly helpful in a time when one element in the basket is particularly volatile. You might recall that last summer gasoline prices were rising pretty quickly. So that would drive the CPI upward. But if you looked at the market basket less energy or less food and energy, the CPI was rather stable last summer. So it can be helpful to look at the market basket minus the more volatile elements or at the individual elements to see how things are going in certain segments of the economy. I heard a story this morning about changes in housing prices. That would come from this market basket right here where housing would cover the rent of a primary residence, the owner's equivalent rent if you were buying, as well as fuel oil and bedroom furniture. So those are some things covered in housing. You'll notice down here near the bottom that a handful of large metropolitan statistical areas are listed. So we could go in and compare inflation, consumer-related inflation in New York to the United States or Philadelphia or Chicago. And below that it gets into larger geographic regions. These align with Census Bureau geographic regions. So we could look at the south and we could compare that to the U.S. for all items. We could click all of these. So you can do one at a time. You could do all of them at once. You pick as many as you would like and then you just click Retreat Data. And here we have the data. Your years are listed on the side, the months are across the top. And you'll see here it tells you what do we have. We've got the CPI for all urban consumers, not seasonally adjusted for the U.S. city average, so all U.S. urban consumers for all items. And the baseline is that 82 to 84 average. Below that we have data for not seasonally adjusted, south urban consumers, all items, 82 to 84. And what we can see here is that in June the U.S. average was 238 and something and it was 232 and something down here in the south. So in the south where I happen to live, inflation was a little lower than it was across the United States. And if we wanted to, we could download all of the data for the various geographic regions to get a sense for which ones had higher inflation to pull up that national average. You'll see for each of these charts, we've got the option to download into Excel. And we have additional format options. Here we could just click include graphs and hit go. And here's a graph of inflation for the U.S. Here's the graph of inflation for the southern U.S. But if you want even more control over how your data is reported out, you can go here to more formatting options. And here you can report original data or you can change the time frame over which it was reported for all years or you can specify a particular date range. Or you can just pick one month. So maybe your student just wants to look at January for each year. Then you've got output type as an option, HTML or text, common delimited or tab, tab delimited. And in this case, include graphs as checked because I had checked that on the previous page. And then after you've made these changes, you can click retrieve data again and you'll get that data back. So in this case, let's just check 12 months and we'll leave it at annual data and let's retrieve. And so now we've got just annual numbers instead of monthly numbers. But the monthly, the table is still here and you can still download into Excel. And your students might find it more convenient actually to grasp the data from Excel. But they could of course cut and paste this particular graph into a paper or PowerPoint slide. So we're still in the CPI section so we can only pull data related to the CPI. But here we have many more options. So we can pick the US city average or we could pick a class of city and these are based on population. So we could pick, you know, medium sized cities. And I'm interested in the southern section since I live in North Carolina. And maybe I'm interested in food at home. I want map seasonally adjusted. And so here I've got the CPI for urban customers who live in the south. And this is the indication of the inflation rate on food items that were purchased with the intent of consuming at home, basically groceries. And so you may recall that the overall inflation rate in June for the south was 232 and now it's 238. So inflation on groceries was higher than the overall market basket. And again, we could go back and download the different segments of the market basket to see what area hold its average or held the average down on the overall market basket because you can see there was upward pressure on the total CPI from food. And as always, you can download to Excel. So those are the two straight forward ways of getting to the data. We started in the subject area for consumer prices. We pulled down to the CPI databases. We took a look at top picks, which are the most frequently requested data items. And we looked at one screen where we could have pulled the same information or we could get more granular on both the items we wanted to look at and the geographic area within which we wanted. Let's look at data tools as another so we can click on all data retrieval. And once we're in data, we can still select the particular subject area that we saw up here in the subject areas. It's kind of a matrix between whether you want data or publication within any one of these topical areas. And from here, you can access again top picks or one screen starting with inflation and scrolling down through each of the topical areas that we looked at. So here, if you just want data, it's convenient to just jump to the data tool and then jump to your particular area. Like if you wanted monthly employment hours and earnings, you could go here and look at top picks or select one screen and walk through to your data table. There is a multi-screen option that lets you pull multiple data series at a time. Most of the time, the top picks and the one screen adequately cover whatever my students need or my patrons need. The multi-screen is a lot more complicated. I sometimes get tripped up. I very rarely go here to find what I need, mostly if in top picks or one screen. And especially if you are a beginner with the Bureau of Labor Statistics, I would encourage you to start in one of these two areas within a topical area to find the data that your particular patron needs. So those are the three paths to data. You go to the subject area and pick the data table section or you go to data tools and pick your subject area from there. Keeping in mind, you can always search up here in the search box. So multiple paths to the same data table. The other thing that's of value at BLS are the publications. Because they do more than just gather data, they produce a lot of articles and reports that explain the numbers. And you can see I've already been into a section called beyond the numbers. But if you just scroll down, you've got latest publications, productivity and retail wholesale food services and mining industries. You've got recent articles. Here's a link to the monthly labor review, which is their particular publication and its articles. You've got the occupational outlook quarterly, which gives you quarterly information about different topics this month. It looks like they're looking at self-employment. And you've got career guides, which the occupational outlook handbook lives here with the Bureau of Labor Statistics, along with some other career guides. They produce magazines and journals. They've got chart books, which have data in them. And you can see they're the long list here. So here's women in the labor force. Are you interested in gender-specific employment? You can find that here. You've got an entire catalog of all the BLS publications, access to their research papers, copyright information, and you've got contact information and then a fun quiz if you'd like to take that. Publications, and again, huge, your table of contents or what's on the page, and these are all hyperlinks. So publications, data, that's what the Bureau of Labor Statistics has to offer. And both would show up if you search up here in the search box.