BU Establishes Membership with Boston Federal Statistical Research Data Center
Boston University has established a two-year institutional-level agreement with the Boston Federal Statistical Research Data Center (BRDC). This agreement will provide qualified researchers the opportunity to perform statistical analysis on non-public microdata from the Census Bureau, National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), and Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). The BRDC is a U.S. Census Bureau facility in operation since 1993 under a Joint Project Agreement (JPA) between the Census Bureau and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), located at 1050 Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, MA. The BRDC
Data available for use within the secure RDCs include:
- A wide range of Census microdata files https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/ces/data/restricted-use-data.html
- Data collaborations among federal statistical agencies https://www.census.gov/about/adrm/fsrdc/federal_partners.html
- Restricted-use data from FSRDC statistical agency partners through their proposal process https://www.census.gov/about/adrm/fsrdc/about/available_data.html.
A resource is also under development in collaboration with ICPSR to provide information about data available in the FSRDC https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/web/pages/appfed/index.html.
The BU Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences (CDS) worked with the University’s sourcing and procurement team to execute this agreement. All BU affiliated researchers will be covered by this institutional agreement, and will not be required to pay lab fees for each individual project. BU faculty interested in pursuing BDRC access should contact Chris DeVits at the Faculty of Computing and Data Sciences (cdevits@bu.edu)
