Providing Access to the Federal Information Base for Evidence Based Policy Making

• Activity Number: 311 - SPEED: Environment and Health, Governmental Policies and Population Surveys, Part 2
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, July 30, 2019 : 9:25 AM to 10:10 AM
• Sponsor: Government Statistics Section
• Author(s): Marilyn Seastrom* and Jennifer Nielsen
• Companies: US Department of Education and National Center for Education Statistics/IES/Dept of Education
• Keywords: Evidence-Based; Open Data; Data Inventory; Data Access; Information Collection Requests

Abstract

The 2018 Open Government Data Act codifies the 2013 OMB Open Data Policy requirements for comprehensive federal data inventories. The Act calls for inventories to include metadata on each agency data asset: title, owner, last update, all variable names and definitions, public or restricted by law, how to access data, and other metadata needed to make the data inventory useful to the agency and the public. The team that developed the ED Data Inventory (EDI) in response to the 2013 OMB Open Data Policy realized that much of the information needed populate the inventory is contained in the formal Information Collection Request required as part of the Paperwork Reduction Act. Having demonstrated the concept in a beta version of the EDI, the ED team realized that to establish the EDI as a living metadata repository there is a need to standardize the ICR package format to allow the electronic extraction of information needed to populate the EDI. Through the first round of awards of Open-Data funding, ED was provided resources for these next steps in the development of its EDI. The content and functionality of this next generation of the EDI will be demonstrated in the electronic poster.