This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Three columns isn't much in the data world, but it's enough to tell a story — especially, it seems, at Brigham Young University's police department.
The data set, provided by the Utah County Sheriff's Office, showed the frequency of which BYU police accessed the records of 21 other police forces in the county from March 1, 2015, through Sept. 15 of this year. The Salt Lake Tribune published a story online Monday and in Tuesday's print edition about the data and a few trends found in them.
Are you an amateur data sleuth or otherwise interested in searching for trends yourself? Download the data via Socrata in the spreadsheet embedded above. (If you're on a mobile version, click here to go to the Socrata webpage.) Click on the "Menu" tab to find the download function.
Reporter Jessica Miller received the data from the Utah County Sheriff's Office after partially winning an appeal with the Utah State Records Committee. The committee ordered the sheriff's office to provide the three columns: Time and date of access, the table being accessed and the mode used.
The sheriff's office emailed Miller the data in a PDF. The data set for you to download has been converted to a Microsoft Excel file, but is otherwise as the sheriff's office provided it.
If you find anything interesting, feel free to send an email to webmaster@sltrib.com. One warning: there are — to reference a Van Halen strategy — some brown M&M's in the data, and we will make sure you removed them before publishing anything you think you've found.
The Daily Herald also obtained a data set of BYU record access, but it appears reporters there only received data on how frequently BYU accessed records from two of the 22 agencies in the county user group.
Update: The Utah County Sheriff's Office provided a key for the "Mode used" field:
• V: Record Viewed
• R: Record viewed through Mobile
• S: Search
• I: Involved record Viewed
Twitter: @natecarlisle