University of Michigan

Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), the world’s largest social science data archive, will work with members of the institutional repositories (IR) community to preserve and reuse legacy social science data. Over the last 50 years, improvement in data processing technology has resulted in increased amounts, formats, and complexities of research data on a variety of social, economic, and political subjects. Through its participation in the Data Preservation Alliance for the Social Sciences (www.digitalpreservation.gov/partners/datapass/datapass.html), funded through the Library of Congress National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program, ICPSR has discovered hundreds of social science data sets that are in danger of being lost forever and that could be reanalyzed with current techniques. The project will salvage many important legacy studies and their supporting data sets by converting them to new formats and will at the same time develop tools and workflows to improve the archiving of current data. The project intends to develop robust partnerships with the IR community, establish preservation best practices for archiving social science datasets, and identify and design archiving support services with specialized data archiving and dissemination tasks.