Today, much statistical data can be found on the World Wide Web.  But when you need more detail, often you still need to consult offline sources such as journals, books, and CD-ROMs.  Or you may need to consult online sources that are available by subscription through a library, but not to the WEB as a whole. Rutgers Camden's library is a U.S. Government depository and has many statistical publications.

Some useful publications available through the library include:
The Statistical Abstract of the United States, also available on the WEB, which is the first place to look for most US government statistics
The State and Metropolitan Area Data Book --Comprehensive data for states and metropolitan areas
USA Counties --Over 5,000 data items for all counties on one CD-ROM
The County and City Data Book -- Data for all counties and cities with a population of 25,000 or more
Our library also provides WEB links to many online statistical sources, some of which must be accessed at the library or with a password supplied by the library.

For statistics available only through the library, get instructions from the library's WEB site or from a librarian.  Other university libraries, and many public libraries, have similar services.  Today's librarians, wherever they may be physically located, are information specialists providing access to global resources.  In our area, you might want to check the New Jersey State Library, the Camden, Burlington, or Gloucester County library systems, the Cherry Hill Public Library, or your own local public library.

The links that follow on this page are to sites available to any WEB user, without having to go through a library.

A good place to begin in accessing government statistics is the Statistical Abstract of the United States,

which is the government's statistical handbook.  It is useful both for the statistics it contains and for its references to other government sources.  You can find this online, although it may be more convenient to read it as a book at the library.  The library also has back editions, useful for time series analysis, not all of which are available online.  To the Statistical Abstract online, you usually have to download data in Adobe Acrobat *.pdf format although sometimes you can also download data in spreadsheet format.   Some frequently used data are also available in html.  To find the information you need, it is often helpful to download the index file first.

The census bureau's home page is at http://www.census.gov. and includes links to many sources.  If you just want a quick fact on a state or a county, try http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/index.html

For statistics on criminal justice, the Bureau of Justice Statistics offers graphs and data that are quite useful for criminal justice courses.  They have especially good materials on drugs and on homicide.  Data from the National Crime Victimization Survey are also available from the BJS.

New Jersey criminal justice statistics are available from the N.J. State Police.

Other criminal justice sources include:
The Uniform Crime Reports   and the Crime & Justice Electronic Data Abstracts

the Office on Drug Control Policy and the Federal Bureau of Investigation which publishes data from the Uniform Crime Reports. The National Archive of Criminal Justice Data has the original data sets from many studies.  Using these requires downloading an entire data set in SPSS format.  You can then analyze the data yourself, answering your own questions, which may be different from those addressed by the people who did the study.

The General Social Survey is a nationwide survey repeated every couple of years, often repeating the same questions.  Frequencies are available online in html format, or you can download the data files and analyze them using SPSS.  These can be accessed at the University of Michigan survey research center.  There is now a similar site for the Eagleton polls done in New Jersey.

A good source for economic statistics is the Economic Report of the President, available conveniently from the University of Missouri.  Links to economic statistics useful for time series analyses.are available on this page from the University of Buffalo.

Ethnographic data from anthropological studies are available from the Human Relations Area Files.