We Love Data: UK Libraries Resources to Discover, Analyze, & Store Research Data

Data: it’s everywhere. The readings of every sensor, the swipe of every credit card, the answer to every opinion poll, each and every click, even our very heartbeats, REM-cycles, and steps all add to the unruly pile. 

Positioned at the doorway to this exponentially expanding universe of information, UK Libraries can help you discover the data you need – and make sense of what it means. 

Our librarians simplify the search process and help you access high-quality data sets and sources. Once you have your data, we can help you bring it to life with analysis and visualization tools, including specialized software and equipment in The Stacks: Digital Scholarship Center, a hub for the exchange of ideas and innovative transdisciplinary research. We can also help you find data generated by the UK community, or store your own and make it freely accessible to scholars around the world. 

Data Sets & Sources

Whether you’re looking for climate data, Gallup polls, health statistics, or 16th century sermons, our librarians can help you develop discipline-specific strategies to locate and evaluate relevant data sets. 

With more data available than ever before, UK Libraries plays a critical role in guiding access to high-quality data sets and sources. Check out resources to help navigate and evaluate data sets or browse data sets available to UK researchers by subject. 

Start on your own with the data collections that UK Libraries makes available to all users:

• Sage Research Methods: Learning modules and sample datasets for learning data analysis methods, organized by subject area.
• ICPSR: A home for social science research data, including a wide variety of surveys. UK Libraries' institutional membership allows researchers access to the full suite of search tools, including data enhancements and curation support.
• Roper iPoll: An aggregation of survey data from a wide variety of pollsters and made available in many file formats. This is an ideal data source for digging into public opinion on a vast number of topics or adding context to a paper or research project.
• HathiTrust Research Center: Structured textual data for more than 18+ million volumes from libraries around the world, along with a suite of tools for building collections of volumes and analyzing them at scale.
• English Corpora: Collection of English-language texts that enables researchers to investigate topics such as the frequency of certain words or phrases or shifts in language over time. 

Our librarians can also guide you to the data you need by navigating open data sources:

• Data.gov: The centralized home for accessing more than 300,000 open data sets produced by the federal government, covering an astounding range of subjects from climate and environmental data to economic indicators to public health statistics. Visit our Open Data Sources guide for additional data portals for US states and local governments.
• National Center for Health Statistics: A resource for building estimates of disease prevalence among the US population, with the ability to examine trends over time and stratify by demographics and geography.
• Generalist data repositories such as Dryad, Zenodo, and Harvard Dataverse are all great options for locating research datasets – or for sharing data of your own. 

For more information on finding and managing data or to request a dataset purchase, contact Research Data Librarian Isaac Wink at isaac.wink@uky.edu, or visit our Research Data Services Guide for additional resources, workshop recordings, or to schedule a one-on-one consultation.

Data Applications Resources

Once you’ve discovered or compiled your data, it’s time to put it to work. Our librarians assist researchers and scholars with the use of digital tools and computational methods across all academic disciplines and skill levels. We can help you refine your data and bring it to life using analysis, visualization, and modeling applications.

Stop by The Stacks to use our computer workstations with high-end graphics cards and specialized software in support of data analysis and digital projects.

Get started on your own using resources from our collections:

• R for Data Science: A practical online resource for all skill levels. Learn how to import, transform, and visualize your data and communicate the results using R and RStudio.
• Python Crash Course: A textbook available at the Science & Engineering Library providing a project-based introduction to programming in Python, including data visualization techniques.
• Discovering Statistics Using IBM SPSS Statistics: A how-to guide on reserve at Young Library detailing the data management and advanced analytics powers of SPSS Statistics software.
• SAS Essentials: An online resource providing a step-by-step introduction to SAS statistical software for data analysis and interpretation.

This spring, Data Applications Librarian Diane Parr is offering an in-depth workshop series devoted to the data analysis and visualization software R and RStudio. Find registration information for the in-person workshops on our Digital Scholarship & Data Events Calendar. 

For more information on data applications, contact Diane Parr at Diane.Parr@uky.edu, or check out our Data Applications Services Research Guide for additional resources, step-by-step tutorials, or to schedule a one-on-one consultation.

Data from UK Scholars

Discover data from UK scholars in the UKnowledge Data Collection. The products of the work of researchers from across the university, these data sets span topics from physiology, neuroscience, and aging to civil engineering and environmental sciences.

UKnowledge – the university’s institutional repository – stores, organizes, and provides open and stable worldwide access to scholarship, data, and creative works generated by the UK community. 

Storing your data in UKnowledge can help increase its discoverability and elevate the profile of UK researchers. UKnowledge can also help you discover data about your data, as usage statistics allow you to track the impact of your work throughout its lifecycle. 

For more information on accessing or storing data in UKnowledge, contact UKnowledge Library Specialist Kyle Bachman-Johnson at kyle.bachman-johnson@uky.edu, or visit our Publishing & Impact page.