OECD iLibrary: Not your daddy's OECD

The OECD is an intergovernmental organization devoted to enhancing economic cooperation and the promotion of democracy created in 1961 out of the Marshall plan. A list of OECD member countries is available here. Accession candidate countries are ones that want to be members of the OECD. Enhanced engagement countries are ones that haven't joined but are key players. Brazil and South Africa may become candidates for accession. The organization publishes a huge amount of research and data available to UNCG researchers and students through OECD ilibrary. We have had SourceOECD, but this new product is ten times better.

Here are some highlights of the new product:

• On the main page of the OECD ilibrary, you can look up information by theme or country. This includes themes like Education and Health that people may not associate with the OECD.
• iLibrary includes book, journal/papers, working papers (which are unofficial reports by researchers associated with the OECD), the well-known fact books, and, your favorite, STATISTICS!
• iLibrary still includes tons of the OECD books, so check there often. We hope to have the books available through the Library Catalog by December. If you think we might have an OECD publication, just ask our librarians!
• Pretty much everything seems to have an RSS feed now, which is really helpful. You could do a RSS for a journal, the main economic indicators, the latest releases in a particular theme, your favorite table, pretty much whatevs. They also provide citations for each individual piece.
• OECD.stat within iLibrary is the statistical warehouse. It provides access to wide range of OECD data sets from economic indicators to health issues stats. Metadata are available for all datasets and provide source information. Keep in mind that OECD's role is to aggregate and harmonize data, so they are getting most of it from the country's source agency.
• And speaking of health, OECD Health Data 2010 is out and is still quite comprehensive. It is linked on the front page and no longer requires downloading an application.

Those are just some highlights. I encourage you to consult OECD iLibrary for any international or comparative work with a social focus. Next month I will do a short tutorial demonstrating some of these features. In the meantime, have fun! Great stuff!

Why is the OECD your new BFF?

Because the publishing arm of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development is the most savvy and user-oriented data publisher around (beyond of course my other BFF SimplyMap). What has the OECD done to deserve my love? The OECD Factbook 2009 is now available as an iPhone and iTouch app. That's right dataheads, you can take your economic indicators out on the road with you. Below is a screenshot of the Total Population for the 30 OECD countries and OECD cooperation countries (Brazil, Russia, etc).



While the bar charts aren't visually interesting, it is still pretty nifty to have major indicators from 30 countries at your fingertips (Potentially useful for my bar trivia addicts). I would love to see a more interactive version at some point (e.g., be able to choose specific countries to display and compare). Nevertheless, this e-reference book is a great start. Thanks OECD!