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“Data Warehouse” to Lead CDL Government Information Initiative

December 7, 1999 Author: CDLCategories:

As the next step in developing a systemwide strategy towards digital government information, the CDL has committed to establishing a CDL “Data Warehouse” by July 2000.  This action is being taken in response to Andrea Sevetson’s report “Developing a Strategy for Providing Access to Digital Government Information: A Framework for Action” (see [http://www.cdlib.org/libstaff/sharedcoll/gii] for the charge, executive summary, and all five proposed actions) and the encouragement expressed at the recent University Librarians/SOPAG Joint meeting (November 19, 1999).  The report and recommended actions were developed in consultation with the UC Government Information Librarians, SOPAG, and the CDL Joint Steering Committee on Shared Collections.  The Data Warehouse effort will begin immediately under the direction of CDL Senior Associate Trisha Cruse and Director for Shared Content Beverlee French.

The report’s executive summary suggests that a Data Warehouse be created to provide a single, easy-to-use WWW interface through which users can easily find, combine, and use data (statistics, numeric data, and text) about population, crime, income, education, health, and other topics, without having to identify original data sources.  This full-scale initiative will aggregate numeric data about California from federal, state, and local agencies, as well as from nonprofit organizations.  In addition, many data sets have associated text files (codebooks, explanatory notes, articles, etc.), and these materials will also be integrated in the Data Warehouse.  This project will unite data from variety of formats and media (Internet, tape, CD-ROMs, etc.) into a single user interface and will provide a mechanism for data preservation.”

By taking this action, the CDL will:

  • Create new knowledge and content that can be made available to the entire State – business, government, and K-12;
  • Create an infrastructure or model architecture for handling large digital warehouses that may have additional applications; and
  • Not only solve today’s information problems, but provide long-term solutions for data access, preservation, and data migration.

The CDL will also explore two other proposed actions in conjunction with the Data Warehouse — creating a Web-based interface to important federal data on CD-ROM and capturing California agency Internet material