Data and provenance

Sources

The verified record comes from licensing boards, the body that issues and disciplines the license. Zuse uses each board's published roster, the state's open-data copy of it, or, where the board's site refuses programs, the file a person downloads from the board's own directory. It does not scrape behind logins, work around access controls or bot checks, or automate one-at-a-time lookup forms.

Jurisdiction	Source	Records, of every status
Alabama	State Board of Veterinary Medical Examiners, its License Verification List	2,747 veterinarians, 670 licensed veterinary technicians. No status column (a license counts as active until its expiry date) and no locations
Arizona	State Veterinary Medical Examining Board, from its directory	6,983 veterinarians (regular, specialty, faculty, state employee, non-resident, temporary), 3,027 certified veterinary technicians. No locations
Arkansas	Veterinary Medical Examining Board, its public roster	1,402 veterinarians, 274 veterinary technicians, 3 reproductive technicians. Active and inactive licenses, with work addresses; no issue or expiry dates
California	Department of Consumer Affairs, Veterinary Medical Board	17,724 veterinarians, 12,225 registered veterinary technicians, 15,082 veterinary assistant permit holders
Colorado	Department of Regulatory Agencies, State Board of Veterinary Medicine, on data.colorado.gov	14,521 veterinarians, 5,237 veterinary technicians (including provisional)
Connecticut	Department of Public Health, on data.ct.gov	4,226 veterinarians. Connecticut does not license veterinary technicians
Florida	Department of Business and Professional Regulation, Board of Veterinary Medicine	11,318 veterinarians. Florida does not license veterinary technicians
Idaho	Division of Occupational and Professional Licenses, Board of Veterinary Medicine, from its online services	2,145 veterinarians, 557 certified veterinary technicians, 175 euthanasia technicians. Few rows carry a location
Illinois	Department of Financial and Professional Regulation, on data.illinois.gov	13,212 veterinarians, 4,690 certified veterinary technicians
Iowa	Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship, Board of Veterinary Medicine	2,731 veterinarians, 1,238 registered veterinary technicians, with city and state
Kansas	Board of Veterinary Examiners, its published lists	2,923 veterinarians, 860 registered veterinary technicians. Active, limited and suspended licenses only, and no locations
Maryland	State Board of Veterinary Medical Examiners, its OneStop directories	4,772 veterinarians, 1,461 registered veterinary technicians. Names and status, no locations; veterinarians have no license number
Massachusetts	Board of Registration in Veterinary Medicine, exported from its look-up	10,116 veterinarians, every status, with city and ZIP code
Michigan	Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs, Board of Veterinary Medicine	4,764 veterinarians, 3,739 veterinary technicians. Current licenses only
Mississippi	Board of Veterinary Medicine, compiled from its look-up	2,428 veterinarians, 535 certified veterinary technicians. City only, with no state, so License check only
Missouri	Division of Professional Registration, Veterinary Medical Board	3,798 veterinarians (10 of them provisional), 1,091 registered veterinary technicians. The board's listing holds current licenses only
Montana	Department of Labor and Industry, Board of Veterinary Medicine, from its licensing portal	2,960 veterinarians (including temporary), 347 licensed veterinary technicians, 60 veterinary dispensing technicians (counted as assistants), 164 euthanasia and embryo transfer technicians
Nevada	State Board of Veterinary Medical Examiners, from its register	3,563 veterinarians (including diplomates and graduates awaiting licensure), 1,865 veterinary technicians, 820 technicians in training (counted as assistants). The register publishes names, category and standing only: no license numbers, status, dates or location
New Jersey	Division of Consumer Affairs, State Board of Veterinary Medical Examiners	9,120 veterinarians. New Jersey does not license veterinary technicians
Oregon	Veterinary Medical Examining Board, from its directory	4,900 veterinarians (including veterinary interns), 2,456 veterinary technicians, 461 euthanasia technicians. No locations
Rhode Island	Department of Health, Board of Veterinary Medicine	1,502 veterinarians, every status, with city and state
South Dakota	Board of Veterinary Medical Examiners, compiled from its look-up	944 veterinarians, active licenses only. The board registers technicians, but its public look-up covers veterinarians only
Vermont	Office of Professional Regulation	2,266 veterinarians, every status. Vermont licenses veterinarians only
Washington	Department of Health, on data.wa.gov	11,710 veterinarians (including 43 specialty licenses), 6,316 licensed veterinary technicians, 10,679 veterinary medication clerks and technician trainees (counted as assistants)
West Virginia	Board of Veterinary Medicine	810 veterinarians, 321 registered veterinary technicians, 53 animal euthanasia technicians. The board publishes active licenses only
Wisconsin	Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection, Veterinary Examining Board	6,657 veterinarians, 5,525 veterinary technicians, current and previous holders
Wyoming	Board of Veterinary Medicine, its own rosters	1,797 veterinarians (including temporary), 318 euthanasia, artificial insemination and embryo transfer technicians. Wyoming does not license veterinary technicians

The Illinois records are published by the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation under the Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL). Zuse uses them with attribution to IDFPR. Controlled-substance registrations of Illinois veterinarians are left out, because they belong to veterinarians already counted.

GET /v2/coverage lists every US jurisdiction and, for veterinarians, technicians and assistants, whether its records are loaded, open to load, available on request only, or published only as a one-at-a-time lookup.

What a board publishes differs:

Discipline. Colorado, Idaho, Illinois, New Jersey, Washington, West Virginia and Wyoming publish a mark on licenses with a board action on record, and Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Montana, Oregon and Washington publish disciplinary statuses (revoked, suspended, surrendered, probation). Nevada marks registrants "with notices or restrictions". Connecticut's, Florida's and Missouri's files carry neither: their statuses are active, expired and inactive only. A license from those states with no red flag has therefore not been checked for discipline; use verify_url. California's roster carries no discipline either, but its board publishes each action since 2020 (accusations, citations, probation, suspensions, revocations, surrenders) on yearly public pages. Zuse reads those and attaches each action to the license it names, only when the license number, its type and the holder's name all agree, and returns it in board_actions with the board's own words, the date and a link to the board's document. An accusation is an allegation the board has filed, not a finding.
Location. Alabama's, Arizona's, Kansas's, Maryland's, Nevada's, Oregon's and Washington's files have no address, Mississippi's gives a city with no state, and Idaho's has one on few rows, so those licenses answer a License check but do not appear in Nearby, which needs a ZIP code.
Nevada publishes no license numbers or status column in its CSV. license_number remains empty. A download confirmed to contain only active registrants can be imported with --status Active; that import assertion is recorded in the source configuration. Without an explicit roster status, records remain status: "unknown". A missing number never determines whether a license is active, and board-action flags are retained independently.
Past licenses. Michigan, Missouri, South Dakota and West Virginia list current licenses only, and Kansas active, limited and suspended ones, so a lapsed license there is not found rather than shown as expired.

Phone numbers and email addresses that some board files include are not loaded.

Specialty and professional credentials

Board certification in a specialty is granted by a specialty body, not a licensing board. Zuse reads the public directories of the bodies whose terms allow it, and attaches a credential to a license only when the match is not in doubt: one person of that name and profession in that state, or, for a national list, in the whole index.

Body	Credential	Held for
American Board of Veterinary Practitioners	Diplomate ABVP: canine and feline, feline, avian, equine, exotic companion mammal, reptile and amphibian, shelter medicine, food animal, dairy, fish	The states in the index
American College of Veterinary Anesthesia and Analgesia	Diplomate ACVAA	The states in the index
NAVTA, Committee on Veterinary Technician Specialties	Veterinary Technician Specialist (VTS), by academy	National list, attached where the match is certain
New Jersey Veterinary Technicians and Assistants	NJ Certified Veterinary Technician (NJCVT)	New Jersey, held on its own: the state licenses no technicians to attach it to
American College of Veterinary Ophthalmologists	Diplomate ACVO	Every state, from its public directory
American College of Zoological Medicine	Diplomate ACZM	National list, attached where the match is certain
American Veterinary Chiropractic Association	AVCA certified animal chiropractor	Every state; veterinarians attached to their license, chiropractors held on their own
Canine Rehabilitation Institute	CCRT, CCRVN/T, CCRA, CVAT	Every state, attached where the match is certain
Technician specialty academies: anesthesia (AVTAA), dental (AVDT), clinical practice (AVTCP), physical rehabilitation (APRVT)	Veterinary Technician Specialist (VTS)	Their public member lists, attached where the match is certain
Veterinary Hospital Managers Association	Certified Veterinary Practice Manager (CVPM)	National list, held on its own: no state licenses practice managers
Veterinary Hospital Managers Association	Certified Veterinary Office Manager (CVOM)	National list, for checking a name only

The other AVMA-recognized specialty bodies, including internal medicine, surgery, emergency and critical care, dermatology and radiology, are not covered yet. A person with no certification listed may still be a specialist.

Clinics

Nearby clinics joins three lists, each clinic once:

Source	What it gives	Coverage
State boards' registers of veterinary premises	Name, address, the board's premises licence; in Florida and West Virginia the veterinarian responsible	California, Florida, Missouri and West Virginia. Florida's file gives the address the board writes to. A clinic listed at a company's head office is placed where OpenStreetMap maps it when its name is its own; otherwise it is kept but not on the map
Clinics certified practice managers were found to work at	Name and address, reported, with the page it came from	Across the US, from research on VHMA's CVPM and CVOM holders
OpenStreetMap	Name, address, exact point, and often phone, website and hours	Every state, as mapped by its contributors: thinner than a board's register. Open data (ODbL), shown with "© OpenStreetMap contributors"

A board's clinic and OpenStreetMap's are matched by street address, then by the distinctive words of their names nearby; the board's record leads.

How a roster becomes the index

Ingest. The roster is downloaded and checked before anything is replaced. A truncated or malformed download is rejected, so a bad fetch never overwrites good data.
Normalize. Each board's license types and status labels are mapped onto one vocabulary (for example profession: "veterinarian" and status: "active"), while the board's original label is kept in license_type.
Resolve people. Licenses that belong to the same person are linked under one person_id, using the name together with location.
Snapshot and diff. Every ingest is recorded as a snapshot. Records are compared with the previous snapshot, so new, changed, and removed licenses are known rather than inferred.

Freshness

Rosters are re-ingested on a schedule, monthly by default. A license's status in the index is the status at the last ingest, so a change made by the board since then will not appear until the next one. When a decision depends on a status being current to the day, confirm it at the board's own lookup, which every match links to in verify_url.

What is and is not in a record

Returned: name, license number, license type, profession, credential, status, expiry date, and the city and state of the address of record.

Not returned: street addresses, dates of birth, or any contact details. Contact details, when requested, come only from the separate Background layer and are marked as derived.

Precision and limits

Names are matched fuzzily. License check returns a similarity score. Several people can share a name, so use locality and profession to confirm identity.
Location is postal-code level. Records are geocoded to the ZIP code of the address of record, not to a street address. See Nearby.
The address of record is not a workplace. It is whatever the licensee filed with the board, which may be a home, a clinic, or a mailing address.
Person resolution is conservative. Two licenses are linked only when the evidence agrees. Some people who hold licenses in more than one place may appear under more than one person_id.

Corrections

If a record is wrong, the fix belongs at the board, and Zuse picks it up at the next ingest. If the index does not match what the board publishes, tell us and we will investigate.