Analysis: Data Sets

For this blog, I found a two-part story called "Glamour Beasts: The dark side of elephant captivity" by the Seattle Times reporter Michael J. Berens.
I located this story using www.nicar.org's Extra Extra section.
The reporter used many documents from zoo records and from animal advocacy groups. Many of the documents were zookeeper logs about attempts to inseminate elephants in zoos.
There was a compelling interactive graphic that mapped out where and how many elephants had died at zoos across the United States. The was a table below the map that listed the elephants' name, age, sex and cause of death.
There is another interactive graphic that follows the timeline of a famous elephant family in captivity.
The reporter must have had to do extensive digging in zoo records to find this information about the elephants, especially since some of it is incriminating in the health of the animals.