The invention and proliferation of personal computers has made possible great advances in the collection, storage and analysis of data. However, access to this data has been limited to those who have the new technology and know how to use it. The result is that increasing amounts of information are available, but many of those who could benefit from its use are unable to take advantage of it. The INFOSHARE Community Data System was designed to overcome this paradox.

Even when the data are available, it is easy for the average citizen to become overwhelmed with the amount and scope of information available on demographics, economics, housing, health care, environment, land use, or public services. Data are often not comparable, the technology is difficult to learn, and putting it into useful form can be costly and time-consuming. Thus, local service organizations such as community health centers often run into difficulty in finding, translating, and analyzing the wealth of information potentially available to them. As a consequence, services for the poor, the elderly, the homeless, the sick, new immigrants, and ordinary citizens are less effective than they should be.

The INFOSHARE Community Data System addresses these problems directly. Its principal features are (i) ease of use in viewing and retrieving a wide range of community data, (ii) automatic presentation of data for a variety of special-purpose districts defined by different city agencies, and (iii) export of data into a form suitable for graphing, mapping, and other application software. Users can define their own communities or service areas utilizing census tracts or zip codes. They can make comparisons to other areas and produce graphs, tables, spreadsheets, and maps (usually thematic maps) utilizing software programs with which they are familiar. INFOSHARE utilizes simple menus which make the process of data selection and extraction straightforward and quick. This allows the user to select easily from a wide range of data for comparative analysis and mapping, making the processes of documenting community conditions and performing needs assessments fast and flexible.

The INFOSHARE system currently incorporates over two dozen local, State, and Federal data sets describing socio-economic and health conditions in New York City. Its set of data files is being expanded to include data for all of New York State and, ultimately, other states as well.

INFOSHARE users can view and extract information on the demography, socio-economic status, vital statistics, hospital admissions, and other data about any community. Racial, ethnic, and income distributions, birth and death trends, communicable disease incidence, and hospitalizations can be analyzed. Profiles of individual geographic areas -- descriptions of the social, economic, and health status of a zip code or a community health center service area -- can be displayed, printed, or stored in spreadsheet and ASCII data files.

Data Conversion Modules allow users to incorporate their own data, including specialized data bases such as patient listings, into INFOSHARE. Once integrated into the system, these data sources have all INFOSHARE features, including automatic aggregation to larger geographic levels, creation of spreadsheet and other files, and preparation of maps and other forms of visual output.

INFOSHARE has been used to conduct a variety of needs assessments. Demographic and health profiles of individual community districts have been generated, and these communities have been compared using many of the data sets in the INFOSHARE files. Some users of INFOSHARE incorporate their own data, such as patient information, into the system, so they can compare this data with the characteristics of the population in their service area.

In the past year we have developed a profile of elderly Asians in New York City and have prepared multi-variable "Report Cards" on the 51 City Council Districts of New York City. Among the specific data products we have provided to community-based organizations are the following:

• A broad range of health indicators to a private commission studying the health needs of the uninsured in the Bronx.
• Data on infant mortality, unemployment, and projections of race and ethnic composition for a Dominican community organization.
• Data on open space, racial, and economic composition for groups interested in demonstrating the need for green space in New York City.
• Data on immigration and population change in a number of neighborhoods in New York City, for groups working with immigrants of various national origins.
• Demographic, housing, income, education, crime, and health status profiles of a number of specific neighborhoods where organizations were seeking to provide improved social services.

Community Studies of New York, Inc., a non-profit organization with a small staff of planners and geographers, assists users in formulating specific questions and in using INFOSHARE to provide answers and present information in the most effective manner. In this way, clients with only limited expertise in social service planning can, with our help, utilize INFOSHARE to acquire the information they need.

The most successful and continuing users of Infoshare have been organizations such as the City University Medical School and Sunset Park Health Center in southwest Brooklyn. They have two ingredients that seem to be necessaary for the effective use of such a system: (i) they have an in-house staff -- actually, just one or two people -- with the knowledge and interest necessary to learn how to use a data-rich computer environment, and (ii) they need data on the characteristics of local communities since their principal mission is to serve -- or, in the case of the Medical School, learn to serve -- community constituencies. They have the knowledge and the motivation to use what, even in its simplest form, is a complex set of software and data packages.

In general, then, our clients have been organizations, not individuals. Our principal funding depends upon fees we charge users of our services, including clients who have the Infoshare system installed on their organization's computers. As long as there is no general institutional funding for this kind of service, individuals (for instance, high school and college students doing research papers) will not have this kind of data source available to them.

A data service such as this one should be available through a public access facility such as a public library or school and college library system. Numerical information, like textual information, is a public resource which should be widely accessible. However, even if that were to become possible, our experience suggests that mere access to this kind of quantitative information is not enough. There must be knowledgeable backup staff at the information provider's site, to provide potential data users with guidance on selecting relevant data, defining appropriate scales and rates, and understanding the limitations of the various data sources. Further, even though we find that most users today have some familiarity with the use of personal computers, they are still primarily experienced only in using word processing programs. They have little or no experience and a low "comfort level" with tools for quantitative manipulations, such as spreadsheet programs, and we believe that today's mapping software is far beyond the capabilities of the average user. (There has been some progress, using the World Wide Web, in making mapping capabilities easier to use and more widely available; however, these necessarily offer a limited number of data sources and data elements at any one site and focus on specific geographic areas and boundary definitions.)

We have spent the past ten years, not only developing the INFOSHARE system, but also breaking down many of the barriers we encountered in persuading government agencies to release this kind of community-based information. As the technologies for data dissemination, especially the CD-ROM, have become cheaper and more convenient, we have found these barriers to be dropping. However, obtaining ongoing funding for this kind of public-interest data access continues to be a problem. Likewise, information overload makes it difficult for community advocates to segregate the most appropriate data for their constituents. We find that we must continue to educate our users on the availability, the definition, and the relative degree of reliability of the data that is available on their communities.

What is clearly needed is the recognition that a facility like a public library should have the responsibility for providing this kind of data and for offering the necessary technical backup to make it usable by the general public. Correspondingly, government agencies should have the responsibility of making their data available to this facility on a continuing and timely basis. Viewing this as simply an extension, in the computer era, of their traditional reporting function might make this vision more acceptable to government officials, who still do not view data dissemination as their responsibility.