The North American Jewish Databank NAJDB: A Rare Population Archive

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The North American Jewish Databank (NAJDB) A
Rare Population Archive

• Cindy Teixeira
• The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research
• University of Connecticut
• IASSIST Conference 2005, Edinburgh, Scotland

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Overview

• What is the NAJDB?
• Challenges
• Extend of the Collection
• Accomplishments
• Future Plans
• Website Demonstration

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UCONN and the NAJDB

• Summer of 2004, NAJDB moved to the University of
  Connecticut (UCONN)
• United Jewish Communities (UJC)
• Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish
  Life at UCONN
• Roper Center for Public Opinion Research (UCONN)

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What is the NAJDB?

• Central Repository for data about the North
  American Jewry
• Established in 1986
• Council of Jewish Federations (CJF)
• United Jewish Communities (UJC)
• Graduate Center of the City University of New
  York (CUNY)
• Website was established in the 1990s
• 2003 the NAJDB moved to Brandeis University

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Goals

• Upgrade NAJDB datasets to todays standards
• Increase the archival holdings
• Stimulate and facilitate research and teaching

www.RoperCenter.uconn.edu
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Challenges

• Amount of materials
• Time constraints
• Website downloading of datasets
• Type of usage
• Processing datasets

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Extend of the Collection

• US National studies (5)
• NJPS 1971, 1990, 2000-01
• NSRE 2000
• NSRI 1990
• US Communities studies (97)

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Short-Term Accomplishments

• While time was ticking away
• Website
• Developing pages
• Implementation and development of dataset
  downloading
• Registration and user agreements
• Processing and Archiving
• Addition of DDI elements to the Catalog
• Confidentiality and data checks
• Documentation and reports

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Accomplishments

• Website and website usage
• Processing of Datasets and Reports
• Newsletter
• Increase knowledge of the NAJDB
• Conferences
• ASA August, 2005
• AJS December, 2005
• Faculty teaching
• Bulletins

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Future Plans

• Determining users needs
• Searchable catalog
• Electronic reading room
• Regional, topical, and community size based
  reports
• Acquisitions
• Over 100 documents being prepared for archiving
• 38 Canadian reports

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Contact Information

• NAJDB website
• www.jewishdatabank.org
• Roper Center website
• www.ropercenter.uconn.edu
• Contact Info
• cindy_at_ropercenter.uconn.edu