Documentation for the ASCII Format of PLDF3

The ASCII formated file, pldf3.txt, is 120 megabytes and has 164,874 lines—one for each observation. It is in order by state, newkey, year, and then span each in ascending order. Given that newkey is based on the two character postal state code, this file is also in order by these codes—not alphabetically by state. This file is available here in zipped format of 17 megabytes.

At one time, this output program largely used the same format as the PLDF ASCII data for FY 2002 from NCES (p. 17+) through column 650. New variables are generally included at the end. Over the years, variables have been added, variable sizes have changed, and other changes have been necessary. For this update, further changes have been made in the output file to make it slightly easier to inspect visually by inserting spaces between the first three variables. In correcting the errors in this file, I found this change was helpful. The ins and outs of the history of this output program, while doubtless fascinating to a few of us, are probably of not much practical value to most so we can leave it at that.

For this update, I added a step I certainly should have done before: I read the data back with another program and compared this dataset with the original. I thank Douglas Galbi, whose contribution to this dataset is acknowledged in the Data Revision History for his spotting an error that resulted in this improvement in my procedures.

The reason the ASCII file is so large relative to others is that it is written with a good bit of empty space. For instance, MASTER, (ALA-MLS Librarians) has 9 spaces in this format, enough for 999,999,999 librarians.

The file was created with a SAS program and the format of this file is:

December 18, 2007