Okay, here it is.....some useful databases you probably haven't heard about or have heard about and just haven't considered using them....

From Steve Doig - Arizona State University

• - My very favorite must-have database is the local property tax roll. Because
  the assessors must mass-appraise and attempt to do it fairly, it includes all
  kinds of useful information about every piece of property: owner, size,
  location, zoning, type of structure, improvements, year built, etc. It was
  what made my Hurricane Andrew analysis work, and over the years I've used it
  for all kinds of stories: tax inequites, changing neighborhood demographics,
  incidence of lead paint, finding slum lords, land fraud, money laundering, et
  al.

• The state Department of Corrections database is useful for all sorts of
  criminal justice things. You can use it for the now-classic joins with
  teachers, day care workers, etc. It can also be used to measure things like
  racial or geographic inequity in sentencing, or recidivism. It could also be
  used to produce a list of examples and potential interview subjects for
  stories on specific types of unusual crimes: Incest, arson, document forgery,
  et al.
  

From Jennifer LaFleur - St. Louis Post Dispatch

• BLM and U.S.F.S. grazing databases

From Pat Stith - Raleigh News and Observer

• state telephone database. I can't tell you how many stories we've done
  out of various renditions of the phone database, everything from tracing
  the movement of officials [everytime they use their state telephone
  credit card the number they call FROM is recorded], to counting the
  number of calls made each morning and each afternoon and using the ata to plot the sharp
  decline in calls made on Friday afternoons [I know, you're shocked.] to
  help show that right many state employees get a head start on the weekend.

• medical examiner database. This thing is eat up with stories. From
  "misadventures" -- people who are killed by doctors or nurses -- to
  unidentified bodies, to nursing home patients who are accidentally
  strangled by restraining devices.

From Nancy Amons - WSMV Nashville

• travel expenses - who spends the most on meals, airline, hotel, per
  diem, etc. (this is where I found the records that lead me to the First Lady's $948 a
  night hotel in Paris)

• State plane data -- Tennessee logs every flight on a state-owned plane into a spreadsheet.
  Find out who travels the most, where they go, who goes with them, is this
  business or pleasure. I used this database in my story on the Governor's
  second home in the Smokies. He flew there several times in the state plane.
  
• Governors calender in electronic form -- In some states you could do a matching project, if the Governor's calender is in electronic form. Then you can see if there was any state purpose.

• Hospital's annual filings -- On the local level, these are kept by the state agency that licenses
  hospitals. You will find the hospital's revenues, costs, staffing levels,
  and a lot of other information. Good for comparing year-to-year changes. I
  did a piece on nursing cutbacks year to year, and how one doctor watched
  his mother in law nearly die because no one noticed her oxygen tank had run
  out. The hospital, in his opinion, was understaffed. Patient census is on
  there too so you can show the number of patients per nurse is increasing.

From David Milliron - Atlanta Journal Constitution

• INS Employer Sanctions Database -- The Employer Sanctions
  Database, maintained by the Center for Immigration Studies, includes all employers which
  have been cited for the knowing hire or continuing employment of illegal aliens. Employers fined
  exclusively for paperwork violations (improper record keeping) are not included.

• Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts bankruptcy data  -- Upon request (although the agency is not open to FOIA) the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts will provide on diskette (usually in WordPerfect or Excel format) of county-by-county aggregate breakdown of personal and business
  bankruptcies by type of bankruptcy (see below). The data has the necessary FIPS code to correlate the data to county and state on its fiscal year.
  
• U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission civil rights data - The data includes information on federal employment discrimination charges filed with the EEOC as well as charges processed by local FEPAs (Fair Employment Practices Agencies) for 1989-1994 (plus 1995 pending cases as of May 31, 1995). States may have additional employment discrimination statutes as well, so be sure to contact your state or local civil rights agencies for that information.
  
• When I was with GNS, we filed a story slugged BEACHES about the high cost of   replenishing and maintaining the nation's vacation beaches. Accompanying the story was a first-of-its-kind computer database compiled by coastal management researchers at Duke University. The database contains information on beach renourishment projects in 25 states as far back as 1935, including locations and
  costs.
  

Bob Port  - APBNews.com

• The only database of federal judiciary employees available - Leadership Library on the Internet. You can get a database of federal employees in the executive branch from the Office of Personnel Management and you can get a list of the members of Congress and their staffs from congressional clerks,
  but ever try to get a database of federal judges? I asked the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts for one and was told to get lost. The courts, of course, are not subject to the Freedom of Information Act. The solution is Leadership Library, the New York City-based publishers of the "yellow book" directories to governments and corporations. A copy of the Judiciary listings is available on CD-ROM or, better yet, go to the Leadership Library web site and you can custom-create and download a full list into a DBF file.
  The listings on the Web are updated monthly. The site is: http://www.leadershiplibrary.com/

• Relating police records to census data - The Law Enforcement Agency Identifiers Crosswalk table. A huge amount of data about crime and law enforcement is available by police agency, but ever try to connect that data to population or demographics? Police department boundaries and census tracts, or census block groups, which are the geographic units that drive demographic data, don't match up. A researcher at the Bureau of Justice Statistices, Susan Lindgren, recognized this problem years ago and built a cross reference table to let one to connect a police agency's FBI ORI (Originating Agency) code to a census FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standards) place code. This makes it possible to compare cops per capita
  from place to place and much more. The file is available from the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data. The URL is:      http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/cgi/ab.prl?file=2876

Tim Henderson's Choices - Miami Herald

• Building permits from the census dept. -- I had no idea this data existed until a reporter ordered it and brought it to me for analysis to document a trend that houses were being built at a ferocious pace in northern Westchester as southern Westchester began to max out. I also found similar patterns noone had noticed before in other counties in our coverage area. It's very up to date, i believe it's only a few months behind real time with monthly updates.

• Birth records -- these were easy to get in NY, but not considered public record in FL, truly a wonderful thing for anyone concerned with demographics and childbirth-related health issues. It comes from the state health dept. and has amazing detail about health and demographics of both mothers and fathers. Helped us document that a huge increase in new Hispanic students was fueled by new immigrant Mexicans and Central Americans, and that these students were likely to pose a significant challenge to the educational system because their parents tended to be more heavily poor -- judging by a field for welfare participation -- and uneducated -- there's even a field for years of schooling! -- than other immigrants or Americans at large. Because there are geographic tags at the municipal level, we were able to pinpoint the location and chart the growth of these new immigrant communities without waiting for Census 2000 which I think will be a good selling point to get this data NOW and look at it. There's similar data on deaths and marriages (and abortions, by the way, truly a 'hidden' database that must be maintained because it's part of the calculation for birth rates) as part of the same 'vital statistics' catalogue. I'm not even mentioning the wealth of information on the health of the mother, risk factors such as smoking and drinking and every conceivable event and health problem that occured during childbirth. We did use it once to document an increase in C-sections. If you're in a big city this stuff may have been analyzed already, but otherwise you're almost assuredly breaking new ground in documenting social and health changes in your community.
  

Drew Sullivan's choices - The Tennessean

• Department of Labor Wage and Hour Enforcement database -- lists businesses and organizations that have been cited for wage and hour violations. What's in this database is often less interesting in what's not in this database. The Department of Labor often look the other way in child labor and immigrant labor cases. Most of the businesses busted are grocery stores hiring underage white teenagers.

• National non-point discharge emmissions system data - This program is administered by the EPA. Local jurisdictions keep the data. The system mandates localities monitor watersheds for non-point discharge pollution and record the results. Often can be used to find companies hooking up the shop drains directly to your storm water system and flushing oils and detergents down into the river.