Products that fall through the cracks

Question

Late yesterday afternoon I received a phone call from a professor in Recreational Administration who wanted access to the average household spending on recreational items in CMAs. He had some prior assistance from the Edmonton STC Regional Office and our Reference Desk, which had identified for him a catalogue number for a table that contained just what he wanted: 62F0031. He had been told that this didn't not appear within the DSP and should be a DLI product... hence his phone call.

I went directly to the Online Catalogue of Products and Services and, even though the catalogue number that he provided seemed a bit short, searched for 62F0031 within Catalogue #. No results.

I repeated the search for 62F0031 within a page. No results.

Next I conducted a site search for 62F0031 and was presented with one result: the Labour Market and Income Data Guide
http://www.statcan.ca/english/freepub/75F0010XIE/3504Ae.htm

A search for 62F0031 on this page discovered the following information:

Products and services:
1. Spending Patterns in Canada (Catalogue no 62-202-XPB or 62-202-XIB)
2. Standard data tables (62F0031, 62F0032, 62F0033, 62F0034, 62F0035, 62F0041, 62F0042, 62F0043, 62F0044, 62F0045)
3. Public Use Microdata File (62M0004XCB)
4. Custom tabulations

The term "Standard data tables" is close to "standard data products".

My questions are:

Are standard data tables a subcategory of standard data products? If they are, can we obtain these tables for distribution within DLI?

I checked CANSIM to see if there was any connection between these standard data tables and any of the series in CANSIM. While Table 203-0010 contains household spending on recreation by province and territory, there is no table for CMAs.

Looking on the STC website under Canadian Statistics / Families, housholds and housing / Expenditures, there is a table for average household expenditures for seleced metropolitan areas. This table unfortunately has no table number or catalogue number by which to reference it. Furthermore, the patron wanted more recreational items than it contains. There are over 60 items identified for recreation in CANSIM 203-0010.

How do I know that the patron had the right standard data table number for CMA?

As a last hope search, I checked the Statistics Canada downloadable publications on the DSP site for Spending Patterns in Canada. In the 2002 edition of this pub, a search for 62F0031 found an appendix with the title, Related Products and Services containing the table number. All of the standard data table numbers listed above were identified in the appendix WITH titles. 62F0031 has the title, Detailed average household expenditure for Canada, provinces and selected metropolitan areas. It appears that I replicated someone's earlier work for this patron but was similarly deadended.

This brings me back to the question, can we get these tables through DLI?

Answer

What we have sometimes found out is that even though the name "standard tables" is given to s product or set of products they are in fact not "standard". That is they are not "off the shelf" tables ready to be disseminated but still require manual intervention based on the clients

Tony Moren here in the Library did some further checking and found this
http://www.statcan.ca:8096/bsolc/english/bsolc?catno=62F0031XDB

The product number you mentioned 61F0031 is actually 62F0031XDB. Looks like these are tables they send out on diskette. We will ask for this product as it is in neither DLI or DSP.