Award Information
Description of original award (Fiscal Year 2024, $73,867)
The Maine Statistical Analysis Center (SAC), proposes to implement a core capacity-building project: Increasing Access to Maine Criminal Justice Data Through Building a Foundational Data Warehouse Infrastructure. Innovations in data management and analysis systems now make it possible to collect, process, and report Maine criminal justice data generated by numerous state agencies in an accurate, prompt, and accessible fashion. However, Maine criminal justice data are housed in a multitude of locations and a sole repository does not currently exist. Therefore, this proposed one-year project aims to increase access to Maine criminal justice data by developing a foundational data storage and management infrastructure to do just that. The Maine SAC seeks to use Structured Query Language server to create a Maine SAC data warehouse that will be capable of storing, manipulating, and managing criminal justice data in one scalable environment. Project activities include using National Incident-Based Reporting System data and Maine prosecutorial data to build appropriate tables and schema that will be capable of efficiently incorporating new data imports and updating existing data. Once built, the Maine SAC Data Warehouse will be directly linked to Power BI so that criminal justice data can be effectively visualized through topic-specific, public-facing data dashboards on the Maine SAC website. This capacity-building effort will make the Maine SAC well-positioned for future collaborations with Maine criminal justice agencies that seek to use interactive data visualizations for complex datasets and make meaningful data available to a wide audience.