Economics 191AC Economics of the Arts and Culture

Spring 2012

FINDING DATA ON ART MUSEUMS, CULTURAL FESTIVALS, DANCE STUDIOS, AND BOOK STORES

PC-users hint: When copying from a webpage to an Excel file, highlight the text you want to copy, right click on it, and select “Copy.” In Excel, right click on a single cell (leave lots of room below), select “Paste Special,” and choose “Unicode Text.” This will often avoid the “all the text in one cell” problem, especially if the web text is organized as a column or matrix. You’ll still probably copy more information than you want, but you can simply delete rows of text that you don’t need.

Art Museums

The American Association of Museums (AAM) lists all AAM-accredited museums by state. These are not all art museums, but include other cultural museums plus history museums, science museums, etc. You will have to decide which ones are relevant to the arts and culture. See http://www.aam-us.org/museumresources/accred/list.cfm

To include art galleries, try using manta.com, which provides free company profiles by city for many smaller businesses. Go to “United States Companies,” then narrow by location and by category. For museums and art galleries, try the “Travel and Leisure” category and scroll down to “Museums” under “Featured Categories.” To filter by states, scroll down to “Current Location” and “Browse States.” See http://www.manta.com/mb.

Cultural Festivals

Your best source for this is probably the web-based cultural calendars put out by city governments or local nonprofit groups. Try googling each of your 4 cities’ names plus <festivals>. Remember that the festival must take place in your city, not a neighboring community.

Can you tell which festivals seem to be community events versus make-lots-of-money events? Check who the organizers and sponsors are…

Dance studios

Manta.com is probably your best bet for a listing. Again, try the “Travel and Leisure” category.

Book stores

Turns out you may be able to get this for your 4 cities from the Economic Census (NAICS 451211), but you can also use manta.com (category “Shopping and Stores”). The American Booksellers Association lists independent bookstores but not chains (Borders, Barnes & Noble, etc.).