Academic study and research is only as good as the data on which it is built. So, easy access to reliable data is paramount for students everywhere.

On Sept. 6, NCSU Libraries became the first library in the country to make the National Center for Charitable Statistics readily available to students and friends of the library in database form. For students interested in researching non-profit agencies, this will be an enormous aid, according to Melissa Johnson, a communication professor.

“A number of other courses in the communication department have service learning or pro-bono components,” Johnson said. “In addition, some classes require that students apply communication theory to organizations. So this will be of considerable use to our graduate and undergraduate students.”

The NCCS is a collection of data on non-profit companies in the United States, pulling information from IRS records of non-profit organizations, other government agencies, private service organizations and the scholarly community, according to the press release for the Web site.

The NCSU community, thanks to this resource, can now extract NCCS data and download it into database, spreadsheet, and statistical program-research-friendly formats.

“Communication faculty whose research relates to non-profits will also find this helpful,” Johnson explained. “For instance, our faculty who do health or environmental communication research will find a wealth of information about non-profits in those fields. For quantitative researchers like me, it provides a great sampling frame from which to draw an organizational sample.”

Students or other researchers in these fields who have not been exposed to the database now have a new resource to which they can turn.”I plan on looking into the NCCS database for an upcoming paper,” Megan Carroll, a junior in communication and Spanish said. “Non-profits are an important area of study in the field of communication.”