The DREAM Lab facilitates access to a wide range of data repositories and online resources, including licensed web services and local collections. We are happy to provide consultations to help identify and recommend data for research, teaching, and exploration. If you need assistance finding or working with a particular resource, don’t hesitate to ask for help!

Online Data Resources

Brandwatch: Social Media Data

Brandwatch is a consumer research firm with tools for accessing and analyzing data from a wide range of social media platforms, including X (formerly Twitter) and Reddit. The Library’s Brandwatch subscription supports a limited number of simultaneous users.

Read more about our Brandwatch services

Esri ArcGIS Online & Living Atlas

Esri and its user community maintain an extensive collection of geospatial data called the Living Atlas. All UCSB students, faculty, and staff have access to ArcGIS Online using their netID’s. Users from departments and units who contribute to the site license have access to all of Esri’s desktop and server software, map and datapacks, and access to Esri technical support.

Read more about ArGIS Online and other Esri tools

HathiTrust Research Center Analytics: Text Corpora

As a member of the Hathi Trust consortium, UCSB affiliates may access Hathi’s full corpus of scanned books via virtual machines or web-based analytics. HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) Analytics is designed to be a source of data for those interested in mining the text of 16 million volumes of printed texts, mostly in English but including over 400 languages.

To access HTRC with your UCSB netID, Select “University of California, Santa Barbara” from the list of institutions during sign in.

https://analytics.hathitrust.org

ICPSR: Social Science Research Data

The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) provides access to a vast archive of social science data for research and instruction. ICPSR partners with government agencies and foundations to provide curated datasets organized in thematic areas ranging from criminal justice to social media. While most data in ICPSR is publicly accessible, some data sets are restricted. Access requirements for restricted-use data in varies

Find data on ICPSR

Refinitiv Eikon: Historical Financial Data

Refinitiv Eikon provides historical financial data including equity, index, commodity, currency, bond, futures, options, and economic data. This software is available onsite in the DREAM Lab and limited quantities via the specialty software request.

Planet Labs: Satellite Imagery

Planet Labs provides access to daily satellite imagery of the Earth’s land surfaces and coastal areas at 4-meter resolution.

Read more about Planet Labs

Data Collections

The UCSB Library’s collection includes many terabytes of data, including geospatial and demographic resources. Any data that you find in Library Search can be accessed in the DREAM Lab. If you are not able to visit the lab in-person, you may request the data by emailing dreamlab@library.ucsb.edu.

If the data you are interested in is stored on a CD/DVD disk, DREAM Lab staff can help locate the item. Otherwise, data collections are stored on one of two network drives (the X: or Y: drive), which are accessible from any DREAM Lab computer.

  • The Open Data Collection (X: drive) contains resources that are in the public domain or are otherwise available to be freely redistributed. You may do what you wish with this data.

  • The Restricted Data Collection (Y: drive) includes resources that are restricted by copyright, licensing, or other factors that prevent us from sharing them with the general public. Please carefully read the metadata and catalog records for specific restrictions on each title.

Within each drive, you will find several sub-folders.

  • Imagery: Raster data ready for use in a GIS.  Organized by folders named with the originator of the imagery. This folder hierarchy includes historic aerial photographs that have been georeferenced by the Library or research partners.

  • LCC: Library of Congress Classification.  These are primarily maps that have been scanned from books.

  • MIL: MIL Classification (follow link to call number guide).  450 titles of vector and raster geospatial data and scanned maps organized according to our in-house call number scheme. Plus disk images pulled off of legacy media from the 1970s through early 2000s.

  • SuDoc (Open Data Collection only): Federal Depository call numbers.  These materials are federal reports and publications either deposited to UCSB or captured from the web. Primarily USGS PDF’s of local interest.

History of the Data Collections

The UCSB Library has a long history of collecting, providing access to, and developing novel search and discovery tools to spatial data. From 1969 until 2017, the Library’s Map & Imagery Laboratory built collections and systems.

In 2014 we assessed more than 20 years worth of collections for inclusion in the new Alexandria Digital Research Library.  Today we are actively working on geodata.library.ucsb.edu, a local instance of BlackLight, while continuing to add to the local file collections described above.