Data archives increasingly represent an open resource for teachers, students and research to support the creation of new knowledge, generate original research, and validate or challenge existing paradigms. For the student, valuable time is often lost performing primary data collection when an acceptable study already exists in the public domain. For teachers, the ability to employ well managed and validated data in classroom instruction allows the educators to focus on the science and methodologies related to the class theme rather than invest time and resources in basic data collection and cleaning. For the researcher, the literally thousands of freely available data sets allow them to increase research productivity and to test hypotheses within a controlled data environment. This presentation will review the wealth of research data available to the research community and offer insights into how to employ these data in developing an independent research career. The presentation will discuss open source data that can be obtained directly from data repositories, how to obtain restricted data with minimal barriers, and how data sharing can help them build their own community of researchers and collaborators. With the tremendous growth of publicly available data resources worldwide, our ability to generate knowledge and information useful for research, policy development and advocacy are increasingly limited only by our imagination and our willingness to exploit the research opportunities these data represent. This presentation will offer students, teachers and researchers an overview of these resources and how to best use them for productive research.
