Electronic Community Fact Books

Abstract

The Local Community Fact Book was developed by urban sociologists of the Chicago School to provide social statistics to local users. The computerized community infor mation system is proposed as the next-generation fact book, to perform the same task. The advantages of the computerized system are that it accommodates a wide range of socioeconomic and environmental variables; it provides historical depth; it presents data graphically; and it facilitates computation and the construction of social indicators. Such a system requires sociological frameworks for the organization of information. One function of a community information system is to circumvent the potential monopoliza tion by specialized bureaucrats of advanced data management.