Office and Location. Empirical Education maintains 5,300 square feet of office space in Palo Alto, California, known as the birthplace of Silicon Valley and the home of Stanford University. The University of California campuses at Berkeley and Santa Cruz are both less than an hour away.
Library Resources. Our staff members have access to the nearby Stanford library containing books, journals, and reference works numbering more than 8 million volumes. Stanford's Cubberley Education Library contains over 150,000 volumes and subscriptions to approximately 670 education journals. The collection includes curriculum guides, educational tests, and historical textbooks. We also have access to the full range of electronic library resources. Empirical Education serves as the Reference Desk for a federally funded regional laboratory, and as such, we access literature databases through the National Library of Education.
Security and Reliability Techniques and Procedures. At Empirical Education we are vigilant concerning the security of our electronic and physical data. Our security policy includes both technical and social procedures to ensure restricted access to sensitive student and school records. We maintain a firewall and use encryption on data requiring confidentiality. We are protected from interruption of operations by a rigorous backup schedule including off-site storage of backup tapes and critical records. Data transfers with clients are fully secure. Clients can upload data via the Internet with our Empirical SecureServer website, which is password-protected and fully encrypted, using VeriSign Security and SonicWall.
Data Warehousing. Drawing on our expertise and engineering resources in data warehousing, common data elements, and formats, our team takes full advantage of school district student record systems to gather data and track implementation efficiently. Our procedures are designed to address the many cases in which data provided by districts have not been fully verified or standardized.