New at the ICPSR - "Generational Memory and the Critical Period: Evidence for National and World Events, 1985-2010:" "Investigators of this study bring together survey data from sources both new and old in order to test the generational hypothesis that national and world events experienced during a "critical period" of later childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood have a disproportionate effect on memories, attitudes, and actions in later life ...

Last year, the Census Bureau rolled out a new interface for the American FactFinder and announced that the old interface would be discontinued. The Census Bureau has now announced that the old/"legacy" interface for the FactFinder will be discontinued on January 20, 2012. See http://factfinder.census.gov/home/saff/aff_transition.html for additional information.

TIGERweb: A new tool from the Census Bureau's Geography Division that allows users to visualize the 2010 census geography. This tool includes legal and statistical areas with their geographic identifiers, as well as the transportation network, and hydrography layers in the TIGER database. In addition, it contains the 2010 Census population and housing unit counts for the various geographic entities.

The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research has now added microdata from state primaries for the 2008 presidential election to its collection of exit-poll data for presidential primaries. Exit polls are currently available for Democratic and Republican primaries for 15 states. The data are available in the form of both fixed-width ASCII text files and SPSS portable (*.por) files.

The Data Center will be closed from 12/23/2011 through 01/06/2012. The Center will re-open for normal business hours on Monday, 01/09/2012. On behalf of the Center's staff, we wish you a suitably festive and safe holiday season. For those of you who observe Festivus, we wish you good luck in the Feats of Strength.

The Census Bureau has released 5-year data for the American Community Survey, covering the years 2006-2010. See http://www.census.gov/acs/www/data_documentation/2010_release/ for more information. Data down to the level of Census tracts are available via the "new" American FactFinder.

The NSF funded SABINS: School Attendance Boundary Information System recently launched a new website with improved access to the data. The data includes school attendance boundaries, census data tabulated for the boundaries, and crosswalking tables that link the boundaries with the U.S. Department of Education's Common Core of Data. The new website features a data extract system and related documentation.

more information: http://www.sabinsdata.org

New at the ICPSR - "Data on International Election Monitoring: Three Global Datasets on Election Quality, Election Events and International Election Observation." The study "focuses on elections and election monitoring throughout the world," such as the presence/absence of issues such as violence and voter fraud. The focus is on national legislative and presidential elections for various periods between 1975 and 2004.

New at the ICPSR - "The Justice of Land in a Land of Injustice, 2004" survey. The study "examined the lingering effects of Apartheid, with a focus on land distribution," but also asks questions about topics such as property rights more generally, civil liberties, politics, and trust between different groups in South African society. The data are available in the usual formats - SAS, SPSS, Stata, tab-delimited ASCII, and fixed-width ASCII.