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ICPSR (Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research) holds the world's largest collection of computer-readable social science data. These data can be used for both research and instructional activities, and are now just a click away. ICPSR Direct provides direct access to ICPSR data holdings for Claremont Colleges students, faculty, and staff. First time users will be asked to create an ICPSR MyData account; thereafter, you will need your email address and password to download data. Search the archive to find data of interest to you.

Assistance in locating, accessing, and analyzing data is available. Please contact Ruth Schooley or Sheree Fu if you need help in any of these areas.

Oxford E-books in Economics and Finance
The Libraries have recently subscribed to a collection of electronic books in the fields of economics and finance, a subset of "Oxford Scholarship Online" which is produced by Oxford University Press. Topics covered in this collection include development, growth, econometrics, economic history, economic systems, financial economics, history of economic thought, macro- and monetary economics, microeconomics, public and welfare economics, South and East Asia, international topics, crisis studies, sustainability, global and national macroeconometric modeling, globalization, labor conditions, and more.

Go directly to Oxford Scholarship Online: Economics and Finance to see titles, authors, and sub-discipline lists of the items included in this collection. Individual titles are represented in the Blais online catalog, as well, and may be searched by author, title, or keyword. Also in Blais, you may key in the title Oxford Scholarship Online, and you will see the list of titles displayed; at that point, you may click on individual titles to bring up the book's record. Within each book record, there is a link to connect to the full text of that book.

International Financial Statistics
International Financial Statistics (IFS) is a standard source of international statistics on all aspects of international and domestic finance. It reports, for most countries of the world, current data needed in the analysis of problems of international payments and of inflation and deflation, i.e., data on exchange rates, international liquidity, international banking, money and banking, interest rates, prices, production, international transactions, government accounts, and national accounts.

Capabilities of IFS Online:

• browsing the directory tree
• drilling down through the structure of the database
• selecting either individual time series or groupings of time series within a table presentation
• saving selected data and metadata in a variety of formats, including a spreadsheet
• saving and loading a query of selected time series

For more information on resources in economics, contact Linda Gunter. For more information on sources for statistics and data, contact Sheree Fu.

Several large organizations, both national and international publish "Working Papers." These documents describe research in progress and are published to elicit comments and to encourage debate and suggestions before final publication; in general, these papers eventually are published as articles in journals or chapters in books. The early publication of the papers allows those interested to see the work-in-progress quickly and enhances awareness of research that is taking place. The Libraries of The Claremont Colleges receive many of these papers, in paper and in many cases online, and make them accessible through Blais (search by keyword, title, author, or organization name), or through the organization's web site. Two prominent and heavily-used examples of this type of publication are the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), www.nber.org and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), www.imf.org . Both the NBER and the IMF publications are indexed in the EconLit database.

The NBER, founded in 1920, is a private, nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization whose purpose is to promote a greater understanding of how the economy works; the NBER undertakes and disseminates economic research among public policymakers, business professionals, and the academic community. A wide variety of research studies have been done at the NBER, resulting in 16 of the 31 American Nobel Prize winners in Economics. More than 600 professors of economics and business presently teaching at universities around the country are NBER researchers and the leading scholars in their fields. The NBER associates focus on four types of empirical research: developing new statistical measurements, estimating quantitative models of economic behavior, assessing the effects of public policies on the U.S. economy, and projecting the effects of alternative policy proposal.

The International Monetary Fund is an organization of 184 member countries, established to promote international monetary cooperation and exchange stability, to foster economic growth and high levels of employment, and to provide temporary and financial assistance to countries needing to ease balance of payments adjustment. Working Papers cover a wide range of topics, such as trade, globalization, fiscal policy, econometric models, consumption, exchange rate volatility, etc. In addition to its Working Papers series, the IMF also publishes the journal, IMF Staff Papers. The objective of IMF Staff Papers is to publish high quality research by IMF staff and invited guests on a variety of topics of interest to a broad audience including academics and policymakers in the IMF member countries. The papers selected for publication in the journal are subject to an extensive review process using both internal and external referees.

For more information, please contact Linda Gunter.