News from PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
Office of Communications
22 Chambers St.
Princeton, New Jersey 08542
Telephone 609-258-3601; Fax 609-258-1301

For immediate release: April 2, 2003
Contact: Eric Quiñones, (609) 258-5748, quinones@princeton.edu

Princeton University Library, research center launch arts and cultural policy data archive
CPANDA is world’s first digital archive of arts and cultural data for researchers, policymakers and journalists

PRINCETON, N.J. -- The Princeton University Library and Princeton University’s Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies today announced the official launch of CPANDA (the Cultural Policy & the Arts National Data Archive), the world’s first fully interactive, Web-accessible digital archive of policy-relevant data on culture and the arts. The CPANDA initiative is designed to help policymakers, journalists, scholars and others gain easy access both to current research findings and to previously hard-to-find data on the arts, including public opinion on the arts, city-specific data and recently released statistics. The archive is accessible at http://www.cpanda.org.

"CPANDA fills a major gap in arts and cultural policy decision-making in the United States," said Stanley N. Katz, director of Princeton’s Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies. "U.S. policymakers, journalists and others have not had access, until now, to a central resource of statistics and studies about the arts and culture. CPANDA is an example of the arts community -- and the foundations that support it -- doing for itself what the government has been unable to do: collecting and making available a wide-ranging set of data about the health, status and organization of the nation’s cultural life."

CPANDA is comprised of four major components:

• the searchable data archive, which is the core of the CPANDA Web site and contains a rich collection of numeric data sets on the arts and culture, together with documentation and associated reports;
• quick facts about the arts, which includes basic statistics about the scope and dimension of the arts and cultural sector, culled from surveys conducted by nonprofit organizations, academic researchers and government agencies;
• research guides, which summarize information currently available in various research areas and include directories of relevant data sets available in the CPANDA archive and elsewhere;
• and other resources, such as topically arranged links to Web resources for cultural policy and the arts and key U.S. and international arts organizations.

CPANDA is the result of a collaboration between the Princeton University Library, the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies and the Philadelphia-based Pew Charitable Trusts, which are supporting the development of CPANDA through an initial three-year, $1.9 million grant to the library. Heading the project for the library is Ann S. Gray, head of data and statistical services. Elizabeth Z. Bennett is project manager for CPANDA, and Lawrence T. McGill of the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies is director of research and planning. Library staff will provide support for CPANDA users. All data in the CPANDA archive are formatted for long-term preservation and access using emerging standards for data archiving.

CPANDA is guided by an advisory group of experts and leaders in a variety of fields, including the federal government, journalism, the social sciences, research libraries and foundations.

About the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies
Part of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies was formed in 1994 to improve the clarity, accuracy and sophistication of discourse about the nation’s artistic and cultural life through research, grants, fellowships, meetings, courses and other programs. For more information, visit http://www.princeton.edu/~artspol.

About the Princeton University Library
Since its founding over 250 years ago with the objective to further the advancement of learning, the library system at Princeton has grown from a collection of 474 volumes in one room of Nassau Hall to holdings in 15 buildings throughout the campus. The combined collections total more than 6 million printed works, 5 million manuscripts and 2 million non-print items and increase at the rate of about 10,000 volumes a month. For more information, visit http://libweb.princeton.edu.

About The Pew Charitable Trusts
Based in Philadelphia, The Pew Charitable Trusts support nonprofit activities in the areas of culture, education, the environment, health and human services, public policy and religion. For more information, visit http://www.pewtrusts.com.