Here’s a catalog to meet neighborhood-level data needs

The Urban Institute in January released an important resource for professionals and residents interested in developing and using neighborhood-level data, the Catalog of Administrative Data Sources for Neighborhood Indicators, by Claudia J. Coulton  (A National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership Guide).

“The capacity to harness administrative records to create neighborhood indicators has been responsible for important breakthroughs data-driven decision making in many cities over the past decade,” Tom Kingsley of the Institute said. “Administrative data are particularly useful for community indicators because they are timelier, and can be applied to smaller areas, than government surveys.”

The new publication describes 42 data sources.  It begins with a brief section on recent developments in neighborhood indicators work, followed by a discussion of some of the challenges of using administrative records data for these purposes. The main body of the monograph is a catalog that describes the sources and gives examples of the types of indicators that can be constructed from each.

The preparation of the new catalog was funded primarily by DataPlace with additional support from the Brookings Institution Urban Markets Initiative. Click here for more information and to download the catalog.