DATA SERVICES

Bits and Bytes

April 2025

Hello Data Enthusiast,

It's almost summer time, which means finals are just around the corner! Remember that Data Services is always here to help. Explore the many ways we support researchers at NYU by visiting our website.

Upcoming Events

Image Credit: NYU Libraries

Data Drop-Ins at Bobst Library

Need help with data analysis or your final project? Stop by Bobst Library, Room 617 on Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 12–3 pm for our Data Drop-In sessions. No appointment needed - just come through with your laptop or use one of our workstations. Assistance is available on a first come, first served basis.

Upcoming Sessions:

Data Finding - Tuesday, April 22 - 12-3pm
R - Wednesday, April 23 - 12-3pm
Stata - Tuesday, April 29 - 12-3pm
Python - Wednesday, April 30 - 12-3pm

We’ll also offer two additional as-needed drop-ins on May 6 and 7th, for particular subjects in high demand.

Featured Data

UltraViolet is part of a suite of repositories at NYU that provide a home for research materials. Data Services helps NYU researchers prepare their materials for deposit in UltraViolet to facilitate open access and long-term preservation. Got your own data, code, or other research materials? Check out our UltraViolet deposit guide and get in touch!

What's New in UltraViolet

Recently, our colleagues at the Marron Institute deposited their Open Data Index for Schools (ODIS) project. ODIS consolidates data pertaining to the communities surrounding approximately 23,000 public high schools across the United States, encompassing magnet, charter, and traditional public schools. ODIS is designed to be a resource for educators and researchers looking to contextualize student-learning outcomes. It provides a set of school-neighborhood indicators as well as a composite index that measures the level of "stress" that school communities experience.

The goal of ODIS is to help better support school communities based on their specific needs and the students and families within them. The dataset exclusively uses public data from reputable organizations with a national reach and an update cycle of no more than three years, ensuring accessibility and reliability. ODIS was developed as a partnership between Marron and NAF, a national nonprofit focused on supporting school communities.

You can also navigate ODIS through a convenient web tool, but the study’s PIs observed that important datasets like this need a stable home in a trusted repository.

Data in the Library

NYU Libraries provides access to a range of data to use in your non-commercial, academic research and teaching/learning. Among these is the ProQuest Congressional Record text-as-data collection, a treasure trove of information for researchers interested in legislative history and discourse. This dataset holds machine-readable files containing the full text and some metadata for the Congressional Record spanning from 1789 to 2005, encompassing 31,952 issues. The data is structured in JSON format, with each file representing a single issue and organized into three parts by year ranges, which optimizes this dataset for computational research — especially since this data is accessible via the High Performance Computing systems as well! The original PDF files from which the text was extracted are also available upon request by contacting data.services@nyu.edu.

If you need access to the most recent issues of the Congressional Record folks should make an access request for ProQuest TDM Studio.

Data Services Team Spotlight

Photo Credit: NYU Data Services

It's That Time of the Year...

As we near the end of another academic year, we want to send a special shout out to all of our graduating Data Services Student Specialists. Congratulations to you all and a heartfelt thank you for all of your hard work and dedication to Data Services and our patrons! 🎉

Photo courtesy of Catherine Aguirre

Welcome the newest member of the Data Services team: Catherine Aguirre

Please join us in welcoming Catherine Aguirre (she/her) to Data Services! In her role as Survey Technical Developer, Catherine will be supporting and enhancing tools like REDCap and Qualtrics. Her work will involve helping all of you develop tailored solutions to survey problems, automate pipelines, and manage integrations between our survey tools and other systems. She will be available for direct consultations (individually or in a group) and will also be conducting training sessions and creating documentation to help researchers across NYU streamline their data collection and survey workflows.

Catherine brings nine years of NYU experience - most recently at NYU Dentistry. She holds a Master of Healthcare Administration from NYU’s Wagner School of Public Service and is passionate about improving process efficiency and driving greater system adoption.

In her own words, when Catherine is not working, you can usually find her catering to her dog, Sherlock, who most definitely does not have her wrapped around his paw ;)

You can reach out to Catherine and all of our Data Services team members by emailing us at data.services@nyu.edu or using our request form.

Did you miss one of our newsletters?

Don’t worry! You can always find our archive of past Bits and Bytes newsletters here. Thanks for reading! We hope to see you soon either on the 5th floor at Bobst or online.

- Your friends at Data Services

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