Free, open, and easy access to data and books

August 7, 2010 by muyiwa

This post is about free access to good stuff.

First, the World Bank Group now provides free, open, and easy access to its comprehensive set of data on living standards around the globe—some 2,000 indicators, including hundreds that go back 50 years through its new data portal at http://data.worldbank.org http://data.worldbank.org/

This new site currently contains the full World Development Indicators (WDI), Global Development Finance (GDF), and Africa Development Indicators (ADI) as well as several other World Bank databases such as Global Economic Monitor (GEM), Education Statistics, etc.

For a full list of data sets available please go to http://data.worldbank.org/data-catalog Most of the data is available in Arabic, French, and Spanish in addition to English.

Second, there's free access to more than 2000 book chapters and journal papers at http://www.intechweb.org/books.php

Finally, if you've ever used Gapminder, you'll be thrilled that you can now download and use Gapminder World, with all its indicators, from an installed application on your own computer. This means you can use it even without an Internet connection. You can also save your own favourite graphs on your computer.

Gapminder have developed this application because it was the single most requested feature on the Gapminder website. According to Gapminder, the application was designed with two usage scenarios in mind: first, for personal use in locations where there is no internet connection, or a very slow connection. Second, for lectures and presentations.

You no longer have to depend on the internet being available in the classroom or meeting room to use Gapminder. Once installed on your computer Gapminder Desktop will automatically check for updates so that your graphs are always up to date with the latest data available. Get Gapminder Desktop from http://www.gapminder.org/desktop/