Resource of the Week — Congressional Resources from the RAND Corporation

Resource of the Week — Congressional Resources from the RAND Corporation
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor

The RAND Corporation is a think tank that also functions as a Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC). it is one of our favorite fishing holes for reports to post on DocuTicker, and we often find interesting items to post here on ResourceShelf as well.
RAND performs research in a wide range of subject areas — the arts, workforce issues, military and defense, international relations, education, health care, and much more. It has a rather illustrious client list consisting of U.S. and foreign government agencies, state and local governments, universities, NGOs/nonprofits, professional associations, and corporations.

While poking around the vast RAND website one day, we stumbled across the RAND Congressional Resources page.

RAND’s mission is to help improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis. The Office of Congressional Relations helps to further that mission by getting RAND’s work to policymakers in Congress and U.S. federal agencies. It also provides information to RAND’s research units about Congressional activities and interests.

There are basically two ways to browse here — by type of resource or by issue. Resources include:

Testimony by RAND staff
Policy Issue Fact Sheets and Publication Profiles (essentially research reference guides in various topic areas)
Congressional briefings summaries — past and forthcoming
A Public Policy Experts Guide to more than 200 RAND researchers, by topic.
A variety of topical newsletters designed to update Congress on RAND research.

(Anyone can register to receive these free by e-mail; note that some are published more frequently than others.)
If you’d prefer to browse by issue, check the blue navigation panel on the left side of the page and chose from among the various legislative issues:

In the middle of the page is a section with four tabs — Upcoming Events (i.e., briefings), New This Month (publications and other resources), Hot on the Hill (current issues for Congress), Newsroom (press releases).

Under New This Month, we found a brand new publication — RAND Corporation Guide for the One Hundred Eleventh Session of the United States Congress, which provides in-depth information about the organization.

This guide for members of Congress and their staffs describes how the RAND Corporation communicates RAND work to Capitol Hill, demonstrates how Congress can use RAND’s resources, and provides an overview of the breadth of RAND research.

While you’re here, you may as well browse the RAND Reports and Bookstore. Most publications can be downloaded as free PDFs, or you can purchase hard copies. You can search the RAND archive of more than 17,000 titles dating back to 1948.

RAND also offers a variety of Public Use Databases, which include social/cultural issue data sets and two noteworthy terrorism-related resources:

The RAND Voices of Jihad Database compiles speeches, interviews, statements, and publications of jihadist leaders, foot soldiers, and sympathizers. Nearly all content is in English translation, and has been collected from publicly-accessible websites. Original links are provided, along with excerpts and full-text content when available.
The RAND-MIPT Terrorism Incident Database is part of the Terrorism Knowledge Base (TKB) compiled by the Oklahoma City National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT); it includes records of international terrorist incidents that occurred between 1968 and 1997 as well as domestic and international terrorist incidents that occurred from 1998 to present.

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 23rd, 2009 and is filed under Resource of the Week, Source File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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