The GSS (General Social Survey) is an "omnibus," personal interview survey of U.S. households conducted by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC). The basic purpose of the GSS is to gather data on contemporary American society in order to monitor and explain trends and constants in attitudes, behaviors, and attributes.

The survey has been conducted 22 times between 1972 and 2004. Its key features are its broad coverage, its use of replication, its cross-national perspective, and its attention to data quality.

The GSS covers a broad range of variables from "Abortion, attitudes toward," to "Zodiac, sign of." Topics are chosen, drawing on the advice of a large number of social scientists, to cover variables strategic for social science research. The eclecticism of the GSS is a mirror of the eclectic interests of contemporary social science.

The GSS is available on a number of sites including the “ Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research” (ICPSR) hosted at the University of Michigan and the Survey and Documentation and Analyses (SDA) website hosted by the University of California, Berkeley. The ICPSR is current up to 1998 and is organized in multiple ways including by subject as well individual variables. The SDA site is current up to 2002 and is accessible only at a variable level. Both web-sites have the ability to both analyze and create subsets of the GSS data in SAS, SPSS, and Stata formats.

Cameron Tuai, Reference Librarian

ICPSR Site http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/GSS/

Berkeley Site: http://sda.berkeley.edu:7502/archive.htm

Index of Hotwire Editions

ECCO - Eighteenth Century Collections Online

Google’s plan to digitize millions of books may take years to come to fruition – meanwhile 150,000 texts are online and at your finger tips right now in the library’s newest database, “Eighteenth Century Collection Online” or “ECCO” for short.

ECCO features texts that were published in English during the eighteenth century, and all thirty-three million pages are fully keyword-searchable. ECCO offers a totally new way of researching this important period of history known variously as the Age of Enlightenment and the Age of Revolutions. Whether your interest is in science, technology, religion, politics, sociology, literature, or otherwise you will find this database exciting and rewarding.

Related Links:
ECCO continues the period covered by “Early English Books Online” (EEBO), which provides scanned images of all English books published before 1700 and keyword-searchable files for nearly 8,000 of them (and eventually for 25,000 texts).

Laura Fuderer, Subject Librarian for English and French Language and Literature
lfuderer@nd.edu, X1-5233