NRS State Data Quality Standards Checklist, 2002

The NRS state data quality standards identify the policies, processes and materials that states and local programs should have in place to collect valid and reliable data for the National Reporting System (NRS). The Division of Adult Education (DAEL) within the Office of Vocational and Adult Education developed the standards to define the characteristics of high quality state and local data collection systems for the NRS. The standards provide an organized way for DAEL to understand the quality of NRS data collection within the states and also provide guidance to states on how to improve their systems. States are to complete this checklist, which incorporates the standards, with their annual NRS data submission to rate their level of implementation of the standards. The accompanying policy document describes DAEL’s requirements for state conformance to the standards and explains the use of the information from this checklist.

Iowa STORET Data Retrieval, 2002

Part of Iowa's Water Ambient monitoring Program, produced by the Iowa Department of Natural Resources.

The State Data Center of Iowa and the Iowa Commission on the Status of African-Americans in Iowa: 2008

To recall and celebrate the positive contributions to our nation made by people of African descent, American historian Carter G. Woodson established Black History Week beginning on Feb. 12, 1926. In 1976, as part of the nation’s bicentennial, the week was expanded into Black History Month. This report gives data information about African-Americans in Iowa.

Welcome to Data Download, Iowa Department of Corrections, March 2008

Data Download is a new DOC newsletter that each month will show how we are using data to help measure what we are doing, and to better inform decisions that we make.

Improved Employment Data for Transportation Planning, 1998

Transportation planners typically use census data or small sample surveys to help estimate work trips in metropolitan areas. Census data are cheap to use but are only collected every 10 years and may not provide the answers that a planner is seeking. On the other hand, small sample survey data are fresh but can be very expensive to collect. This project involved using database and geographic information systems (GIS) technology to relate several administrative data sources that are not usually employed by transportation planners. These data sources included data collected by state agencies for unemployment insurance purposes and for drivers licensing. Together, these data sources could allow better estimates of the following information for a metropolitan area or planning region: · Locations of employers (work sites); · Locations of employees; · Travel flows between employees’ homes and their work locations. The required new employment database was created for a large, multi-county region in central Iowa. When evaluated against the estimates of a metropolitan planning organization, the new database did allow for a one to four percent improvement in estimates over the traditional approach. While this does not sound highly significant, the approach using improved employment data to synthesize home-based work (HBW) trip tables was particularly beneficial in improving estimated traffic on high-capacity routes. These are precisely the routes that transportation planners are most interested in modeling accurately. Therefore, the concept of using improved employment data for transportation planning was considered valuable and worthy of follow-up research.