Drug Retail Data Provider: 16 Cataloged Datasets · Head-to-head
Data.gov catalog - Education-tagged federal datasets vs Campus Safety and Security - Clery Act crime & fire data
Which drug retail data provider: 16 cataloged datasets data fits your job: Data.gov catalog — Education-tagged federal datasets, or Campus Safety and Security — Clery Act crime & fire data. API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.
Data.gov catalog — Education-tagged federal datasets
Campus Safety and Security — Clery Act crime & fire data
Coverage, side by side
| Data.gov catalog — Education-tagged federal datasets | Campus Safety and Security — Clery Act crime & fire data | |
|---|---|---|
| Geographic | `has_spatial` flag with optional spatial extent | `Address`, `City`, `State`, `ZIP` on every row |
| Temporal | `modified` and `last_harvested_date` stamps | Year-suffixed count columns (`MURD21`, `MURD22`, `MURD23`) |
What each contains
Pick by fit, not by loyalty.
| Data.gov catalog — Education-tagged federal datasets | Campus Safety and Security — Clery Act crime & fire data | |
|---|---|---|
| Record identity | `identifier` (UUID) plus URL-safe `slug` | `UNITID_P` campus identifier plus `OPEID` institution ID |
| Named subject | `title` of the described dataset | `INSTNM` plus `BRANCH` naming institution and physical campus |
| Origin attribution | `organization` and `publisher` objects | `sector_cd` / `Sector_desc` control-and-level codes |
| Classification | `keyword` tag cloud, filterable in search | Fixed file families split by offense group and location category |
| Temporal key | `modified` and `last_harvested_date` stamps | Year-suffixed count columns (`MURD21`, `MURD22`, `MURD23`) |
| Distribution pointer | `distribution_titles` listing attached files | One workbook per location-and-offense family, Word codebooks alongside |
| Geography | `has_spatial` flag with optional spatial extent | `Address`, `City`, `State`, `ZIP` on every row |
What each does better
Data.gov catalog - Education-tagged federal datasets
Breadth no single agency can match. More than 10,000 education matches sit inside a 552,271-record estate whose largest contributors are staggering in their own right - the Census Bureau alone accounts for 293,639 records site-wide and NOAA for 87,209. Survey series like the National Household Education Surveys' Parent and Family Involvement file and flagship collections like the Civil Rights Data Collection - the number-one education result by popularity - surface alongside county-level veterans and health releases that no education-only archive would think to include.
Filter depth built for narrowing 10,000 hits. Geographic-area matching on a map box with Within and Intersect modes, keyword and organization filters, an organization-type axis spanning Federal, City, State and County Government, University, Tribal and Non-Profit publishers, and a popularity sort driven by monthly view counts.
Provenance on every record. Each entry carries a harvest trail with raw and transformed variants plus per-record modified dates - the kind of auditability citation-grade research depends on. See metadata harvesting.
Campus Safety and Security — Clery Act crime & fire data
Offense taxonomy written by statute, not convenience. Murder and negligent manslaughter, rape, fondling, incest, statutory rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, motor vehicle theft and arson, then arrests and disciplinary referrals for weapons, drug and liquor law violations, then VAWA offenses - domestic violence, dating violence, stalking - and hate crimes by bias category, where the on-campus file alone runs 394 columns.
Location categories and fire detail. Every statistic splits across on campus, residence halls, noncampus buildings or property, and public property adjacent to campus; since the 2010 collection, residence-hall fires add cause, injuries, deaths and dollar damage.
Denominators, not just numerators. Male, female and total enrollment ride along on every campus row, so counts become rates. The University of Alabama's Tuscaloosa campus prints 31 rapes and 18 burglaries for calendar 2023 against 39,622 enrolled; Alabama A&M's Main Campus prints 6 and 25 against 6,614. Three calendar years ship per release, so restatements stay visible. See Title IV for the participation mandate behind the numbers.
The verdict
Verdict: sample both, pick by fit. Let the unit of analysis decide. If your question names a landscape - which federal collections cover school finance, civil rights or workforce training? - Data.gov catalog — Education-tagged federal datasets is the instrument shaped for it, because finding the right 40 records among 10,000 is the whole job. If your question names a quantity - how many burglaries hit residence halls at these 30 campuses in 2023, per enrolled student? - Campus Safety and Security — Clery Act crime & fire data already contains the answer as rows.
On craft the scores sit close: 8/10 against 7/10 on the Datadory rubric. Neither wins by default; the returned samples make the call.
Sample both, pick by fit. See Data.gov catalog — Education-tagged federal datasets · See Campus Safety and Security — Clery Act crime & fire data
Fair questions
Is Data.gov catalog - Education-tagged federal datasets better than Campus Safety and Security - Clery Act crime & fire data?
Different instruments for different questions. The catalog wins whenever the question is discovery: over 10,000 education-matching records drawn from 120 federal, state, city, university and tribal publishers. The Clery record wins whenever the question is a counted event: offenses, arrests, VAWA incidents and residence-hall fires per campus, per year. Sample both, pick by fit.
Which dataset reaches further back in time?
The campus ledger. Campus Safety and Security publishes collection years 2008 through 2025, each carrying three calendar years of counts, with reporting years exposed back to 2001. The catalog's strength is breadth rather than depth: its records span every agency publication date, with per-record modified stamps such as June 2023 on sampled NCES entries.
Do the two datasets overlap anywhere?
In custody, not in content. Both live inside the federal education estate - the Department of Education alone contributes 815 records to the catalog and NCES appears as publisher on 317 - but one side carries metadata describing collections while the other carries offense and fire counts measured campus by campus. They complement far more than they compete.
Which one should a campus-risk analyst pick?
Start with Campus Safety and Security — Clery Act crime & fire data: location-category splits (on campus, residence halls, noncampus, public property), enrollment denominators for rate calculation and three-year windows per release are exactly what a risk model wants. Then widen the net with Data.gov catalog — Education-tagged federal datasets, whose 10,000-plus education matches surface adjacent city, health and housing collections.
Can Datadory deliver both datasets together?
Yes. Request them separately or merged onto one calendar, delivered daily, weekly, or hourly - your call. Every delivery arrives as clean, documented rows with the field dictionary included, so your team evaluates real records before committing to either source. Or take both in one feed.