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U.S. Government Publications at the University of Wisconsin-Madison : Statistics

How to find U.S. government publications at University of Wisconsin-Madison libraries.

Subject Guide

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Beth Harper
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Memorial Library
University of Wisconsin-Madison

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UW-Madison Research Guides to Finding Statistics

Statistical sources

For the most part, the resources listed here contain statistical tables.  If you're interested in obtaining raw data sets from which you can then generate your own tabulations, see the "data" tab in this guide, or visit Research Data Services' page on Finding, Reusing, and Citing Data.    

For additional statistical resources, see the list of statistical databases on the UW-Madison's Libraries website.

Federal Depository Library Program

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As part of the Federal Depository Library Program, the UW-Madison Libraries make U.S. government publications available to the public at no fee.

Statistics and data: how do they differ?

How are statistics and data different? The following comparison comes from a presentation by Mike McCaffrey, lecturer at the Faculty of Information of the University of Toronto.

Data

  • “Disaggregated” collection of observations with one or more characteristics
  • Generally require manipulation or extraction using utilities
  • Can be values or observations of characteristics “numerically coded”
  • Raw material for statistics

Statistics

  • “Aggregated” and tabulated or cross-tabulated tallies based on data
  • Counts, tallies, totals, “averages”
  • Can be found in print or electronically
  • Normally used as they are presented or retrieved
  • “Facts numerically represented”

From: McCaffrey, Mike. “International Statistics: Helping Library Users Understand the Global Community.” Presentation at the American Library Association’s Government Information Round Table Pre-Conference, International Statistics: Helping Library Users Understand the Global Community, Chicago, IL, June 28, 2013.