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Elizabeth
Z. Bennett CPANDA, the Cultural Policy and the Arts National Data Archive, is a new data archive funded by Pew Charitable Trusts and based at Princeton. Our mission is the same as many other data archives, to collect, preserve, and disseminate data on a particular topic. Our audience, however, is much more diverse than the audiences for most academic data centers. While we expect to serve academic researchers, we also expect to serve journalists, policy makers, the staff of arts organizations, funding organizations, and, ultimately, artists themselves. To serve such a wide audience - many of whose members do not know what a "variable" is - we plan to experiment with some unusual ways of presenting and enhancing our data. These may include: providing downloadable presentation graphics; providing evaluations of each dataset, including assessments of quality and suggested uses of the data; providing statistical summaries; and providing extensive linkages to the literature based on each data set. This paper will describe some of these ideas, and discuss audience reactions from our user testing and focus groups for our site, which is still under development. Elizabeth Z. Bennett |