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Reengineering the Census Bureau's Annual Economic Surveys (2018) / Chapter Skim
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7 Dissemination
Pages 137-148

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From page 137...
... . We then describe current data products and dissemination practices for the annual economic surveys and ways to improve them.
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From page 138...
... 7.1 CURRENT DISSEMINATION PRODUCTS AND PRACTICES Current dissemination practices for the annual economic surveys vary extensively, with different formats and modes across surveys. Some variation is inevitable and in fact could well be desirable given the different needs and abilities across the user types discussed above.
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From page 139...
... One unfortunate consequence of the different practices is disparate data formats that are resource intensive for the Census Bureau to produce and unnecessarily complicated for users. For example, as discussed in Chapter 6, the annual economic surveys have varied cutoffs for statistical precision suppression.
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From page 140...
... The Bureau of Labor Statistics provides more extensive examples of the use of a similar API, starting with an ­ xample that involves a simple function call and only a few lines of code.5 e Practicality and ease-of-use should be a priority for the Census Bureau API; it need not be leading-edge technology. The FSRDC network houses microdata from most of the annual economic surveys, as well as the economic censuses and monthly and quarterly indicator surveys; we anticipate that it would also house microdata from an ABSS as soon as they are available.
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From page 141...
... The potential for cross-cutting research on business dynamics across industries and time will be greatly facilitated once ABSS microdata, based on consistent concepts and measures, are available in the FSRDC network. Two other current dissemination practices for the annual economic surveys are not optimal for users.
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From page 142...
... When combined with an easy-to-use search tool, this targeting would create an efficient system to disseminate annual economic surveys data to less sophisticated users. RECOMMENDATION 7-1: The Census Bureau should design ac cess and retrieval mechanisms for data from the annual economic surveys and an Annual Business Survey System, once developed, to be as straightforward as possible; users should not be forced to use complex tools to do simple things.
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From page 143...
... RECOMMENDATION 7-2: In designing improved data access and retrieval mechanisms for the annual economic surveys, the Census Bureau should learn from and use successful approaches of other agencies and organizations, including, to the extent possible, the use of off-the-shelf interface designs, software, and tools. For all data products from the annual economic surveys and an ABSS, once developed, a key companion goal is to provide users easy access to ancillary information about the data.
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From page 144...
... All widely used statistical software can read spreadsheets downloaded from the Census Bureau website, and Matlab and other programming languages can use the Bureau's API to download data automatically. RECOMMENDATION 7-4: The Census Bureau should provide a user-friendly interface for producing basic statistics, such as per centages, means, and cross-tabulations, and for drawing charts from annual economic surveys data, but more complex analysis should be left to users.
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From page 145...
... Standardization of processes and data products as discussed throughout this report is likely to facilitate reduced times between data collection and dissemination without compromising data quality. As we discuss in Chapter 5, one approach would be the development of preliminary estimates of key outputs from the annual economic surveys, which would be of considerable help to users who require key statistics as soon as possible after data collection.
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From page 146...
... At present, it is unnecessarily difficult for such users to find the data they want unless they have considerable experience searching Excel or text files or navigating www.census.gov and its many legacy webpages. A web-based topical index to the annual economic surveys data with dropdown granularity of detail to guide users to appropriate data locations would be useful.
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From page 147...
... It may be necessary to develop such a plan retroactively for any of the annual economic surveys for which archiving procedures are not clearly prescribed. For this purpose, the Census Bureau can take advantage of existing documentation and archiving standards, such as the Data Documentation Initiative.10 In addition, best practices, such as permanent url addresses (e.g., digital object identifiers, DOI)
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From page 148...
... . Center for Economic Studies and Research Data Centers Re­ search Report: 2016.
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Key Terms

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  • novice users
  • data products
  • surveys data

  • dissemination practices
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  • expert users
  • annual business
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  • federal statistical
  • business survey
  • time series
  • url addresses
  • permanent url

  • economic data
  • current annual
  • data availability
  • data release
  • data center

  • data users
  • economic studies
  • bureau api
  • discovery tool
  • consistent time

  • dissemination tools
  • access tools
  • bureau provides
  • help users
  • release dates


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