NCES Datalabs Tables: Rescue Complete!

If you have been following along with the Data Rescue Project newsletter, you have been receiving occasional updates on our struggle to find and download all of the summary tables that were created by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). These tables are useful because they make it easy for researchers to understand the topline takeaways of the many NCES studies. We received a number of requests to preserve these summary tables as NCES is under threat, but they proved resistant to scraping attempts.

One of our amazing volunteers, louisc, finally cracked the Datalabs Tables website and was able to scrape a complete copy of the remaining tables. He made the full set of tables (around 8,000 of them!) and his scraping scripts available on Data Lumos.

Thank you to all the volunteers who worked on this project over the 9 months (!) it took to conquer, and a special shout out to TripleShrimp, louisc, Jon Petters and Cameron Nielsen for their work.