june11b.indd June 2011 367 C&RL News Joni R. Roberts is associate university librarian for public services and collection development at Willamette University, e-mail: jroberts@willamette.edu, and Carol A. Drost is associate university librarian for technical services at Willamette University, e-mail: cdrost@ willamette.edu I n t e r n e t R e v i e w sJoni R. Roberts and Carol A. Drost National Center for Children in Poverty. Ac- cess: http://nccp.org/. Founded in 1989, the National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP) is a division of the Mailman School of Public Health at Co- lumbia University and a nonpartisan, public research institution dedicated to promoting the economic security, health, and well- being of America’s low income families and children. The NCCP Web site is primarily used to share data and research publications to in- form policymakers, but it also provides data tools and news releases. The researchers at NCCP have diverse backgrounds and train- ing in areas such as psychology, economics, political science, public health, education, philosophy, and social work. The NCCP Web site provides users with easy-to-navigate tools for conducting re- search. State profiles are easy to access by clicking on the state in a map of the United States. These profiles provide demographics and policies for each state related to early childhood, adolescent, and family economic security. Useful data tools include “Basic Needs Budget Calculator,” which is limited to only 19 states at this time, and a “Young Child Risk Calculator,” which calculates the percentage of specific risk factors (single parent, low pa- rental education, teen mother, unemployed parents) for specified age groups in each of the 50 states. The “Family Resource Simulator” allows users to create scenarios that show how fam- ily resources change with increased income. The “50-State Demographics Wizard” and the “50-State Policy Wizard” create tables for specific states based on areas of interest. The “Income Converter” calculates percentages of Federal Poverty Level and State Median Income based on the state, year, and number of family members. Users can search NCCP publications by year, title, project, or topic. Included in these publications are basic fact sheets about low- income children and such topics as mental health, children in the social welfare system, childcare assistance, domestic violence, health care, and homelessness. Current NCCP projects include mental health services for children, preschool educa- tion, social inclusion and respect for diver- sity, and teenage runaways. Each publication is available in PDF format with options to print or e-mail the executive summary with a link to the article.—Lea Currie, University of Kansas, currie@ku.edu National Climatic Data Center. Access: http:// www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/ncdc.html. The National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) is an archive containing the world’s climate data. NCDC is part of the Depart- ment of Commerce, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service. It is responsible for acquiring, archiving, processing, pre- serving, and disseminating a huge variety of climatological data, including weather (from National Weather Service, U.S. military, FAA, and more), satellite, radar, marine, upper air, remote sensing systems data, and much more. The mission of NCDC is to “provide access and stewardship to the Nation’s resource of global climate and weather related data and information, and assess and monitor climate variation and change.” NCDC archives 99 percent of all NOAA data. The quantity of data is staggering. For example, the NCDC has more than 150 years C&RL News June 2011 368 of data with more than “224 gigabytes of new information added each day—equivalent to 72 million pages a day.” In 2010, researchers, faculty, scholars, and students from around the globe down- loaded nearly 1,098 terabytes of data and information. Some datasets have fees but certain Web domains such as “.edu” and “.k12” are able to get data for free based on reverse domain lookup. Additional details on free access are available on the site. In addition to the archival role, NCDC produces reports that describe the climate of the United States and weather trends. Sections of the Web site that researchers will find particularly useful include Extreme Weather and Climate Events and the State of the Climate Global Hazards reports. Another useful resource is the NCDC GIS Map Services, which provide dynamic map- ping capabilities for datasets and products archived at NCDC. The Web site itself is antiquated, and it takes some time to understand the organiza- tion. One gets the sense the data is laid out based on some governmental organizational chart rather than a more cohesive architec- ture. The extensive guide under “Products and Services” can help a user make sense of the huge variety of data and resources that are available. Also the, prototype “NOAA Climate Services” portal reflects an effort to make this data more user friendly. Overall, NCDC is vital to any climate re- searcher due to the rich data and resources available, but expect a tangled path as you navigate this massive site.—Kate Peterson, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, katep@ umn.edu ProPublica. Access: http://www.propublica. org/. ProPublica is an independent, not-for- profit news organization offering investiga- tive stories on a variety of public interest topics. ProPublica has two distinctive major goals: to draw attention to stories with “mor- al force” and to emphasize the fact that these types of stories are becoming overlooked due to business model constraints on media outlets today. ProPublica staff feels that the number of investigative journalism stories is shrinking due in part to the privatization of many traditional news media groups. The site encourages other media venues to “steal” or republish their stories, which is an innovative form of news sharing. ProPublica hopes to impact “positive change” through their reporting and to “uncover unsavory practices in order to stimulate reform.” Content on the ProPublica site is neatly divided into six tabs: “Home,” “Our Inves- tigations,” “Tools & Data,” “Reporting Net- work,” “Blog,” and “About Us.” Under “Our Investigations,” researchers can view stories on such topics as “Gulf Oil Spill,” “Tainted Drywall,” “For-Profit Schools,” “Eye on Loan Modifications,” and “The Wall Street Money Machine.” Users can quickly browse through major topics on the site, but they can also perform keyword searches augmented by tagging. Users can follow ProPublica on all the regu- lar social media outlets, as well. “Tools & Data” contains the background data, visuals, related content, and other resources that back up the information in each story. The ProPublica blog features shorter, current news items with a focus on accountability issues. In some respects, the ProPublica Web site functions almost like CQ Researcher, given its depth, current updates on stories, and statistics. This Pulitzer Prize-winning organization employs 34 full-time journalists and is fund- ed by philanthropic donations. ProPublica frequently partners with NPR and PBS on feature stories. This Web site is an excellent source for researchers following public interest stories and would be of special interest to under- graduate journalism majors.—Molly Susan Mathias, University of Wisconsin, mathi- asm@uwm.edu