Possibly the most venerable tool in investigative reporting is campaign cash. "Follow the money" is not only an axiom in the journalism trade but a reminder of the historic events that motivated many of us to become reporters in the first place. Since its inception, IRE and NICAR's Database Library has collected electronic campaign data from the Federal Elections Commission, cleaned it up and made it available to members for a modest fee. Continuing that tradition, we have today added the 2010 election cycle data to the collection.

The NICAR Database Library has updated two key datasets in our collection – both of which are, quite frankly, a challenge to obtain.

After several years of negotiations, the NICAR Database Library has updated its copy of the FAA Enforcement Information System. This useful database documents cases where airlines, airports and pilots are accused of breaking FAA Regulations — examples include drug-test failures and alcohol abuse on the job.

Our copy of the National Bridge Inventory database has been updated. For more information, please check this page. Additionally, you can buy state slices of this dataset online -- a first for this site. If you wish to purchase only the bridge information for your state, please check this page.

As many of you know, for years the NICAR Database Library has kept more than 40 federal databases useful to investigative reporters covering a variety of topics. One thing that hasn’t changed over the years is our mission of expanding the library collection. We continue to look for new and different datasets that can be useful to a reporter digging for information.

NICAR's copy of the Housing Mortgage Disclosure Act dataset for 2007 has been updated. This dataset, maintained by the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council, provides information about property loans in the United States, including, for each loan application:

• the race, ethnicity and gender of the applicant
• how much money was requested in the loan
• the annual income of the applicant
• if the loan was considered "sub prime" -- defined in this dataset by being three points higher than the prime rate -- how much higher it was
• The U.S. Census tract where the property lies -- highly useful for mapping

Whenever I acquire a new dataset to play with, one of the first things I want to know if how the tables relate to each other. Ideally, I know that for each main record, I'm going to want to know pretty much everything the data says about it. For example, typically when dealing with FEC campaign contributions, I want to know who gave, how much and who they gave it to. And that means joining a few tables, since candidate information is kept separately from donor information.

Did you know you are slightly more likely to die within a month of your birthday? Or that people are fleeing some of the US's largest cities? Well, maybe you did know that stuff. But there's only one way to talk about these concepts with authority. There's only one way to find out exactly how much more likely you are to die within a month of your birthday and how many people are fleeing urban areas. And that's with data.

Hello and welcome to the new site for the IRE and NICAR Database Library. Here you can browse our collection of government datasets and buy them if you are an IRE member. In addition, we hope to offer even more member services on this site, including discussion forums, wiki's, blogs -- even screencasts for some of our training exercises. Those of you who have already visited the site may simply want to get to the data collection. To do that, you should see a link to your left labeled "Database Library". You can always click there, or here is another link to the main collection.