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Temple University led a six-university effort that built a comprehensive public policy database for Pennsylvania, modeled on the national Policy Agendas Project created by Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones (1993). The Pennsylvania database (www. temple.edu/papolicy) enables users to integrate data from all three branches of government and the news media organized into 20 major and 249 minor policy topics since 1979. This article discusses the value of these data, their potential uses in state policy research, and the lessons learned over the four years invested in building the database. Our hope is that interested readers might undertake similar projects in their states to create a standardized national network of state policy databases.researchers are well aware of the challenges in conducting longitudinal analyses of public policy in U.S. state legislatures. Two of the many challenges deserve special attention. The first is data access or information retrieval. The lack of a consistent and comprehensive historical record makes tracing policy change across venues particularly difficult. The second challenge is data analysis or pattern recognition. Even when presented with a comprehensive historical legislative record, longitudinal and, for that matter, cross-sectional analyses are difficult to carry out given the lack of a standardized coding framework. A at Mount Royal University on June 9, 2015 spa.sagepub.com Downloaded from

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