Collection Services

post written by Rachel Torres, Data Instruction and Outreach Librarian

Librarians and staff at the UC Berkeley Library work to ensure our students, researchers, and faculty have access to the journals and books they need. But what about data? Our Data and Digital Scholarship Services team purchases and licenses datasets that span the university’s numerous disciplines. Dewey Data is a platform built for academic research that offers access to numerous datasets including consumer spending, real estate, corporate data, and more. 

How to access Dewey: To login to Dewey Data, select “Login” and “create account” with your UC Berkeley email. After the account has been created, login using your UC Berkeley email, at which point you will be directed to Calnet authentication. 

Popular data sets include: 

• ATTOM Property Tax Assessor Data: Nationwide U.S. tax assessor records carrying parcel number, ownership, legal description, site address, property characteristics, tax and assessed value, and last sale.
• Advan Research Weekly Pattern Plus: Weekly foot traffic to points of interest (POI) across the United States and Canada, with each record covering a single POI over one Monday-to-Sunday week and reporting aggregated visit and visitor counts alongside visitor home-location and demographic aggregations. 
• People Data Labs People and Resume: Individual-level data covering job history and education history, including work experience, education and degrees, majors and minors, certifications, skills, interests, job title levels, and job location. Coverage is global.

Note that some data sets on the Dewey platform require an additional license that we may not have access to. In addition, some datasets are large and users may run into space constraints when downloading to personal machines. Read more and explore data with our Library Guide: Home – Dewey Data – Library Guides at UC Berkeley. 

Questions or suggestions?

If you have questions on how you may or may not use the data in Dewey, especially related to AI, email tdm-access@berkeley.edu. 

And if you have a dataset that you would like the library to purchase, please fill out our purchase request form or email librarydataservices@berkeley.edu.

Check back next month for more data spotlights! 

spotlight photo by max im on Unsplash

 

Librarians and staff at the UC Berkeley Library work to ensure our students, researchers, and faculty have access to the journals and books they need. But what about data? Our Data and Digital Scholarship Services team purchases and licenses datasets that span the university’s numerous disciplines. Many of these datasets can be found in Dataverse, an open-source repository where UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab affiliates can search for data, access platforms, and download files. 

Getting started is simple. Navigate to UC Berkeley Library’s Dataverse and log in using your Calnet ID and passphrase in the upper right hand corner. You will be asked to review and agree to our general terms of use. Note that individual datasets may have additional terms. 

A few datasets to check out: 

• Web of Science XML data: metadata from over 63 million scholarly article records  spanning multiple disciplines (1900 – 2025)
• Linguistic Data Consortium datasets: hundreds of datasets from the University of Pennsylvania’s Linguistic Data Consortium supporting linguistic education and research. 
• RateWatch Scholar: financial data covering banks, credit unions, and savings and loan associations
• Historical Newspapers: San Francisco Chronicle (and other titles!) from 1865 – 1922 in machine readable format

Questions or suggestions?

If you have questions on how you may or may not use the data in Dataverse, especially related to AI, email tdm-access@berkeley.edu. And if you have a dataset that you would like the library to purchase, please fill out our purchase request form or email librarydataservices@berkeley.edu.

Check back for our October spotlight to learn about ICPSR!