Illinois Data Bank

You are ready to deposit data if:

  • your data is in a final state and not expected to undergo revisions.
  • you have removed any private, confidential, or other legally protected information from your data.
  • you are a faculty member, staff member, or graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
  • you have permission to publicly distribute data from all creator(s) and/or copyright owner(s).

Published data:

  • is open to anyone in the world.
  • receives a stable identifier (DOI) for easy reference and citation.
  • is readily available for anyone to access for a minimum of 5 years.
  • is located in a stable environment that complies with many funder and publisher requirements.

Statement of Commitment

The Illinois Data Bank's mission is to centralize, preserve, and provide persistent and reliable access to the research data created by affiliates of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, such as its faculty, academic staff, and graduate students. The Research Data Service at the University Library maintains and operates the Illinois Data Bank on behalf of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign campus. The University Library has a long history of successfully supporting the preservation of and access to Illinois research outputs. The Illinois Data Bank operates within a robust policy framework that fully describes the University's commitment to providing persistent and reliable access to research data.

Researcher Spotlight

featured researcher photo
Michael Lotspeich-Yadao Michael is a Research Specialist in the School of Social Work and earned his Ph.D. in Applied Sociology at Baylor University. As a rural sociologist and demographer, he is interested in how the spatial and temporal modeling of ecological conditions can explain contemporary social problems. Michael currently uses geospatial datasets to provide analytical bandwidth to Illinois agencies that reflect the diversity of our state's communities.
What influenced your decision to deposit your data in the Illinois Data Bank?
Social problems exist within space and time, and thus there are forces at play in Illinois’ communities that are not considered by aspatial theories and analysis. As an undergraduate at Illinois learning about Geographic Information Systems, I would have appreciated having a resource like this to reduce the barrier of entry for a social scientist to think about measures spatially. It just changes your cognitive framework when you can visualize things like racial stratification, population distribution, political election results… or even how all of these measures interact with one another! GIS enhance sociological research by encouraging a different way of thinking about societal challenges.

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