|
PREVIOUS NEWS STORIES 2002New Section in NNIP Web Site NNIP Los Angeles Partner Receives TOP Award First Release of the Neighborhood Change Database Seven New Cities Join NNIP National Healthcare Outreach Mapping Center Established NOVEMBER 2002 - The new section, Neighborhood Change in Urban America, has two components. The first will be the place to find a series of research papers developed to advance knowledge about neighborhood change. The initial papers in this Neighborhood Change in Urban America research series will be products of our Rockefeller Foundation supported project that focuses on analysis of change over the 1990s using census data. However, other relevant papers by staff of the Urban Institute and its local partners in NNIP will be included in the future. The research papers are not there yet - they will be coming out as the research is completed over the next few months. However, a set of abstracts of all of the papers that are currently planned is available there now. The second component presents information about the Neighborhood Change Database (NCDB) - the database that is making possible most of the research papers in the series. It is the only database that contains nationwide census data at the tract level with tract boundaries and variables that are consistently defined across the four U.S. Censuses from 1970 through 2000. NNIP Los Angeles Partner Receives TOP Award OCTOBER 2002 - The Advanced Policy Institute (API) at UCLA received a $700,000 award from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration Agency (NTIA) of the U.S. Department of Commerce. The Technology Opportunities Program (TOP) is administered by NTIA and received 741 applications for FY 2002 funding. With its Neighborhood Knowledge California (NKCA) project, API won the one of the largest TOP grants given this year among the twenty-five selected projects. NKCA will be the first online toolkit to allow users to design their own research, collect data in spreadsheet format, and automatically upload and batch geocode this information on a shared website. The entire NKCA website will be accessible in English and Spanish. Two statewide partners, the California Reinvestment Committee and California Rural Housing Coalition, will assist API in outreach and training on this new system. NKCA will assemble and make available a wide variety of public and private databases to be used by groups working to expand opportunities for homeownership through fair housing and lending research, education, and policy development. More than 40 agencies in five metropolitan areas (San Diego, Fresno, Oakland, Sacramento, and Los Angeles) have collaborated on the design of NKCA to improve their information management capacities in: (1) targeting their community outreach work; (2) collecting data; (3) conducting analyses; (4) exchanging and publishing their findings; and (5) developing coordinated statewide recommendations. These groups will identify and address impediments, such as lack of mortgage financing, or a shortage of bilingual real estate agents, and thereby assist low-income and minority buyers to become homeowners. Project outcomes in low-income communities will be measured by real quantitative changes: (1) expansion in home ownership lending; (2) sales from absentee owner/occupants; (3) banking services; and (4) policy improvement at state and local government levels, as well as among real estate industry partners. First Release of the Neighborhood Change Database SEPTEMBER 2002 - The Urban Institute and GeoLytics, Inc. are now making the Neighborhood Change Database (NCDB) -Short Form Release available to the public. Funded in part by the Rockefeller Foundation, the NCDB contains nation-wide tract-level data from the 1970, 1980, 1990 and 2000 decennial censuses, combined into one easy-to-use product. It is literally the only source of census data with variables and tract boundaries that are consistently defined across census years. It should prove an invaluable resource for policy makers, community organizations, and researchers who want to analyze changes that have occurred in U.S. neighborhoods over the past three decades. Understanding how neighborhoods change over time is fundamental to addressing the problems and opportunities of America’s communities. Many people are not aware, however, that data obtainable from the U.S. Bureau of the Census cannot be used directly for these purposes because of many changes in census tract boundaries and variable definitions over time. In the early 1990s, with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Urban Institute made adjustments as necessary to create the first national data file with consistently defined tract level census data for 1970, 1980 and 1990. That file has since been used as the basis for important research on how the nation’s communities changed over those decades. Rockefeller has again provided funding to allow the Urban Institute to add 2000 census data to the file. To do so, the Institute collaborated with GeoLytics, a well known disseminator of census products. GeoLytics contributed additional resources in order to go beyond just adding the new data. It applied its proprietary weighting tables for 1970, 1980 and 1990 to carefully convert past census data to 2000 tract boundaries and, more broadly, it transformed the software, making it much more user friendly and technically superior to the earlier version in many respects. NCDB data products are being released on CD-ROM using GeoLytics’ proprietary data compression and mapping technology. The data can be accessed using the menu-driven, mapping and analysis software included on the same CD-ROM, or the data can be extracted for use in external database, mapping, and analysis packages. The NCDB will have two separate releases. The current Short Form Release includes Census 2000 short form data -- basic population and housing characteristics from the short form questions answered by all households in the decennial censuses. The NCDB Long Form Release (scheduled for 2003) will include responses to the Census 2000 long form questions that were asked of about one out of every six households in the census: detailed population, household, and housing characteristics, including income, poverty status, education level, employment, housing costs, immigration, and other variables. At the Urban Institute, congratulations are due, in particular, to Peter Tatian who conceptualized most of the changes, oversaw the work of GeoLytics, and wrote a very complete Data User’s Guide (found on the NCDB CD-ROM). In managing the process, he was ably assisted by Kathy Pettit and Jessica Cigna. The GeoLytics team included Craig Cornelius (the firm’s President), Alex Vasilev, Natasha Vasilev, and Katia Segre Cohen. To find out how to purchase the NCDB, visit the GeoLytics web-site: http://www.geolytics.com. The NCDB has been offered at substantially reduced prices to 1,000 community based organizations nominated by the National Community Building Network, the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership, and the Rockefeller Foundation. The Urban Institute is also preparing a series of research papers using the NCDB - the Neighborhood Change in Urban America series, also supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. These will be made available over the coming year on the Institute’s NNIP web site. SEPTEMBER 2002 - Seven new organizations have formally accepted the invitation to become Partners in the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership, bringing the total number of local partners to nineteen. To become an NNIP Partner, an institution must demonstrate that central to its mission is:
The candidate must either have already built such a system and be operating it in this manner, or have made demonstrable progress toward doing so.
NNIP would like to congratulate the new partners on this recognition. Groups in a number of other cities are beginning to develop capacities along similar lines and NNIP plans to further expand the Partnership as more meet our basic requirements. National Healthcare Outreach Mapping Center Established From the IU School of Medicine Website: APRIL 2002 - The Indiana University School of Medicine and The Polis Center at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis have been named by the National Library of Medicine to develop the nation’s only National Outreach Mapping Center. The new center, which is housed on the IUPUI campus at the medical school’s Ruth Lilly Medical Library, will seek to identify and track the special outreach efforts being made by all types of libraries nationwide on behalf of healthcare professionals and consumers. Examples of these outreach efforts include, teaching consumers to “quality filter” the web, supplying information access tools to rural health care providers or working with local community groups to establish health information centers. The center is being established through a five-year contract with the National Library of Medicine, a part of the National Institutes of Health. The IU School of Medicine is an international leader in medical informatics and health care outcomes research. The Polis Center, a multidisciplinary urban analysis organization, is known for its application of geographic information systems technology. Known as GIS, this technology, a tool useful in data collection, storage, mapping, display and analyses, links electronic maps to databases. GIS makes data accessible and facilitates the analysis and comparison of multiple data sets by specific geography. “We plan to integrate data from various libraries and map it in ways that make it easily understandable because it relates to the places where people live,” said David Bodenhamer, Ph.D., director of The Polis Center and professor of history in the School of Liberal Arts at IUPUI. The project will merge IU’s medical and geographic informatics strengths to develop a unique center. “The original mission of the National Library of Medicine was to provide rapid access to health care information to providers of medical care to enable them to improve the quality of that care. Now that focus is being expanded to health care consumers,” says Julie McGowan, Ph.D., the newly named director of the mapping center. McGowan, who is associate dean for information resources and education technology, also is director of library and information resources, professor of knowledge informatics, and professor of pediatrics at the IU School of Medicine. She also is a Regenstrief Institute for Health Care affiliated scientist. Initially, the large database that will be developed by the new mapping center will identify and track a quarter century of NLM outreach efforts. Eventually it will assist researchers to accurately target health outreach activities because they will be able to pinpoint exactly where the information is needed, according to McGowan. In addition to providing information services for the students and faculty of the IU Schools of Medicine and Nursing, the Ruth Lilly Medical Library serves practicing health professionals throughout Indiana and is a designated resource library in the National Network of Libraries of Medicine. The Polis Center is the leader of the North American team of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative, an international effort to create a worldwide database that combines global mapping, texts and images. Source: http://medicine.indiana.edu/news_releases/archive_02/mapping02.html 
For additional information, e-mail NNIP at nnip@ui.urban.org. |
