Reference Transactions

A local researcher is trying to find figures on the number of Great Depression-era foreclosures in Virginia. Simple enough.

Nothing in Annie seemed promising, nor anything in the Statistical Abstracts of the U.S. for the 1930's, although the latter has a lot of data (including state-by-state) on mortgages, including farm mortgages.

I did find data on 1930's foreclosures in the Cambridge Historical Statistics of the U.S., although not state-by-state. However, the source notes were very helpful and included references to a 1948 Housing Statistics Handbook, which arrived via ILL within a couple days.

Alas, that volume also lacked state-by-state breakdowns. Again, however, the footnotes pointed to the original (?) data source, the annual reports of the U.S. Federal Housing Administration.
Which, it turns out, we do not have in our Depository collection.
But (ha!) the 1930's FHA annual reports do show up in their printable full-text glory in our LexisNexis Serial Set collection.

Posted by Dick Grefe at 1:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A student in the Global Politics course (POL 105) has a statistical question:
"I am trying to find a statistic that deals with percentage of GDP spent by the government so that I can compare how Norway does not spend its oil revenues to the extent that a Qatar or UAE does."

Response:

Take a look at the Norway data on this page in the Europa World Plus site.

There also is a narrative description of the Norwegian economy which includes sections on the petroleum industry and government finances.

You can find the same sort of info for Qatar and the UAE elsewhere in the Europa World Plus site, to which we subscribe. Find each country's listing and then look for the "Economy" and "Country Statistics" options in the column on the left.

You also can pluck data from the United Nations Common Database, although I think you might discover that data for Norway is much more current than for the other two countries.

If you need (a lot) more detail on Norway , the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has a book-length report that includes sections on the petroleum sector, etc. See especially chapters 1 and 3.

Posted by Dick Grefe at 8:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I met with a student in the JOUR 221 class who needs to prepare a report on the recent growth and development of the mass media in China.
Here is a brief research guide.

Posted by Dick Grefe at 11:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A student in the JOUR 221 class (Communications in a Global Perspective) has to prepare a report on advertising in Brazil, focusing on contemporary issues.
Here is the research guide we discussed.

Posted by Dick Grefe at 12:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The 15 students in Cliff Kiracofe's class are responsible for monitoring current international events, issues, etc., so I provided links to important news sources. They also have to write a term research paper on some issue or controversy in current international politics.
Here is the research guide.

Posted by Dick Grefe at 2:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Bill Connelly has asked me to help with the development of a new Web site for the Washington Term program. Two of the components (so far) are:

A revised collection of U.S. political news sites

He wants a way to search the Web sites of important public policy groups for information on internship opportunities for students. We came up with a Google-based search engine, now available at the top of this page.

I posted this summary in the "New for Politics" blog for other members of the Politics faculty.

Posted by Dick Grefe at 1:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)