Timeline

Margaret Levenstein reappointed as director of ICPSR

From ISR Director David Lam in March 2021: “I’m pleased to report that Maggie Levenstein has agreed to serve a second term as director of ICPSR, extending her term from July 1, 2021, to August 31, 2026. Maggie has done a fantastic job in her first term as ICPSR director, continuing the many excellent ongoing programs in ICPSR while expanding the center into exciting new directions. There was very strong support for reappointing Maggie from the ICPSR Situational Review Committee, the ICPSR Council, and from faculty and staff across ICPSR and ISR.”

ICPSR is the New Official Home of International Love Data Week!

ICPSR became the new official home of International Love Data Week. “Thank you to Heather Coates for her incredible leadership over the past several years and to all of the committee members and volunteers who helped turn this into an international event,” read an ICPSR website announcement from January 2021.

Welcome to Data Brunch, A New ICPSR Podcast!

ICPSR launched a new podcast called Data Brunch, which focuses on stories about data, the people who use, seek, or create data, and why people should care about data. Episodes are available on Soundcloud, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.

Introducing the Data Archive for Interdisciplinary Research on Learning (DAIRL)

ICPSR collaborated with Mindset Scholars Network, an organization that works at the intersection of education research, practice, and policy, to develop the Data Archive for Interdisciplinary Research on Learning (DAIRL), a publicly available data and paper repository. DAIRL provides an infrastructure for sharing and using existing datasets to promote innovative questions and insights about student learning. It is designed to support researchers in applying an equity-centered, multidisciplinary, and practical lens to their work.

Happy 20th Birthday, ICPSR Bibliography!

In 2000, the National Science Foundation provided funding to create the ICPSR Bibliography of Data-related Literature. The ICPSR Bibliography is a freely-available, searchable database of citations to published and unpublished scholarly works. Each citation has two-way links: out to the publication and into ICPSR’s study catalog, providing access to the data being analyzed in the publications. Because of these linkages, the Bibliography facilitates data discovery and literature searches by social scientists, students, librarians, journalists, policymakers, and funding agencies. The Bibliography would go on to celebrate its 100,000th entry in 2021.

Today, the Bibliography is supported by the ICPSR Membership and ICPSR’s topical archive sponsors, who see the Bibliography’s value to both data producers and data users, and have invested in building the Bibliography for their collections.

NSF selects AERA and ICPSR to create new STEM research data hub

The American Educational Research Association (AERA) and the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) joined forces to create a research data hub to connect, educate, and build a community around STEM education data resources. This platform was competitively selected for support by the National Science Foundation through its Core Research Program in the Directorate of Education and Human Resources (ECR). Partnership for Expanding Education Research in STEM (PEERS) is a web-based platform that includes wide-ranging forms of data and data resources, and fosters new networks of research collaboration and communication in STEM education. AERA and ICPSR also offer training, technical assistance, and professional development opportunities to expand access to and use of data and to support innovative ideas and inquiry. The PEERS project is being led by Principal Investigators Margaret Levenstein (ICPSR) and Felice J. Levine (AERA), and co-Principal Investigators George Wimberly (AERA) and Susan Jekielek (ICPSR).

ICPSR launches new repository for COVID-19 data

The COVID-19 Data Repository was launched to archive data examining the social, behavioral, public health, and economic impact of the novel coronavirus global pandemic. This is a free, self-publishing option for any researcher who wants to share data related to COVID-19.

United States Census Bureau Data Repository debuts

A new US Census Bureau Data Repository has been launched to preserve and disseminate survey instruments, specifications, data dictionaries, codebooks, and other materials provided by the Census Bureau. The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), the host of this repository, has also listed additional Census-related data collections from its larger holdings.

Margaret Levenstein named director

Margaret Levenstein, ICPSR’s first female director, began her five-year term on July 1, 2016. An economist, Levenstein first joined ISR’s Survey Research Center (SRC) in 2003 as the executive director of the Michigan Census Research Data Center (MCRDC), a joint project with the U.S. Census Bureau. Her other roles include being a research professor in SRC and adjunct professor of business economics and public policy in the U-M Stephen M. Ross School of Business; associate chair of the American Economic Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Program; and past president of the Business History Conference.

U-M, MSU and Flint community partners launch Open Data Flint archive at ICPSR

Open Data Flint is an open-to-the-community data repository that aims to assist the community of Flint, Michigan to:

• Bring together data to help build the evidence base to achieve a healthier Flint community.
• Gain a deeper understanding of the far-reaching impact of the water crisis on the Flint population.

Open Data Flint is a project of the Healthy Flint Research Coordinating Center, which is a collaboration between community leaders, community-based organization partners, and researchers at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, the University of Michigan-Flint, and Michigan State University.

Archonnex

The much anticipated release of the Archonnex platform occurred in the summer of 2016. This platform will allow ICPSR to become more nimble and agile to the market demands of its funders, membership, researchers and internal operations for the ingestion, storage, processing, dissemination, publishing and reuse of data.

This platform is based on industry standards for archival systems (OAIS – Open Archival Information Services), W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) and Web 2.0. It is implemented using a Java technology stack for Enterprise Applications and built on top of several widely accepted and community supported Open Source products such as Fedora (repository software) from DuraSpace, Apache Foundation’s Tomcat, Jena and Solr. Archonnex has been built using components to improve scalability both horizontally and vertically. It is also designed for extensibility to play nice with others in the industry who support a Services Oriented Architecture approach to integration and reliability between vendors and their products.

openICPSR v2.0 helps researchers meet open-access mandates extends workspace area for research and enhances extensions for Institutional Repositories.

ICPSR launched version 2.0 of the full production version of openICPSR. The product was built entirely on the new Data Science Management platform created by ICPSR called Archonnex. The flexibility, scalability and adaptability will continue to ensure that data can and will be preserved and archived for every researcher. Because of this product being release on the new platform, this product can offer for the first time to researchers and depositors the ability to collaborate and even share data amongst different disciplines of the various sciences and data platforms.

National Archive of Data on Arts & Culture (NADAC) launched

Funded by National Endowment for the Arts, NADAC provides the underlying data for the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA) and General Social Survey (GSS) to researchers, policy-makers, arts practitioners and others. NEA is providing free access to NADAC’s data files and related resources, as well as a user-friendly platform for querying the data.

openICPSR helps researchers meet open-access mandates

ICPSR launched a beta version of openICPSR, a new research data sharing service that allows the public to search for and access public-use social and behavioral science research data at no charge, providing a means for data depositors to full the public-access obligations of grants or contracts.

Archive of Data on Disability to Enable Policy and research (ADDEP) is introduced

The mission of ADDEP was to improve and enable further research on disability for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners by acquiring, enhancing, preserving, and sharing quantitative and qualitative data on disability.

Building Community Engagement Project launched

With funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, ICPSR began its Building Community Engagement Project. It involved two meetings with editors of peer-reviewed social science journals and with representatives of domain-specific data repositories to discuss data-citation standards, access to research data, and sustainable funding models. Four research projects focusing on data citation and data management were funded by the project’s grants.

As an outcome of the meetings, a Call for Change document was issued by more than two-dozen representatives of domain repositories, and a white paper was released recommending that new, sustainable funding models be developed.

Public access to data encouraged

Half century of ICPSR commemorated

ICPSR celebrated the 50th anniversary of its founding by Warren Miller. A year of events included a symposium featuring Nobel laureate and former ICPSR Council Member Elinor Ostrom.

Receptions were held at the Official Representatives meeting, as well as at various professional meetings.

Partnership with China Data Center begins

The University of Michigan China Data Center (CDC) and ICPSR became partners. While housed at ICPSR headquarters in the Institute for Social Research, the CDC officially reports to the Office of the Vice President for Research at U-M and is operated as an independent data service. The CDC integrates historical, social, and natural science data on China and offers an online geographic analysis system. Membership in the CDC and ICPSR remained separate, but synergies between the organizations added value for both.

MET project established

ICPSR received a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to archive videos from the foundation’s Measures of Effective Teaching project. The MET project involved recording videos from more than 3,000 volunteer classrooms across the country. ICPSR archived those videos and made them available first to MET research partners, and subsequently to other researchers determined in a competitive grant award from the foundation.

Authorized users can securely access the videos through a Web-based streaming service, and quantitative data through a secure virtual data enclave.

The project was ICPSR’s first involving video data, and allowed the Consortium to establish the infrastructure to accept such data from other depositors in the future.

George Alter named director

George Alter, interim director since November 2009 and a researcher and administrator at ICPSR since 2007, accepted a five-year appointment as ICPSR director.

His research interests focus on the history of the family, demography, and economic history.

Before coming to ICPSR, Alter held various positions at Indiana University.

Along with the directorship of ICPSR, Alter has appointments at the University of Michigan as a history professor and at the ISR Population Studies Center as a research professor. He also served as 2011 president of the Social Science History Association.

 

Integrated search made available

ICPSR deployed a new version of the traditional study search. It queried not just the study-level metadata records, but also the variables in the data, citations for related literature, and the full text of the documentation files.

The search was designed so the top 10 to 20 results will be more targeted and useful. Queries that previously returned no results returned some hits under the new search, as matches can be found in the variable text. In general, the new integrated search returns more results.

To facilitate managing the larger result sets, ICPSR added new functions to the study results page:

• Links that automatically take visitors to the first and last pages of the result set
• Option to display 50 or 100 results per page
• Additional information in the right well of each result if visitors sort by release date, number of downloads, or number of citations
• Improved time-period facet that lets users enter a start year and an end year

 

Data Seal of Approval awarded

ICPSR became one of the first six data repositories to earn the Data Seal of Approval designation.

Created by the Data Archiving and Networked Services archive in The Netherlands and overseen by an international board, the Data Seal of Approval is intended to demonstrate to researchers that data repositories are taking appropriate measures to ensure the long-term availability and quality of data they hold.

The seal sets forth 16 guidelines related to trustworthy data management and stewardship. It is awarded after an online self-assessment regarding a data repository’s adherence to the guidelines. The assessment is reviewed by the DSA Board.

Historical demography project funded

Grant awarded for mortality study

PreK-3rd archive created

Terrorism Preparedness Data Resource Center established

International Data Resource Center established

Jacoby appointed Summer Program director

Minority data archive opened

Paper competition started

MyData established

Undergraduate internships created

DSDR created

The Data Sharing for Demographic Research archive promotes the sharing of public-use data; sharing of restricted-access data; long-term archiving of demographic data; improving the science of data sharing and archiving; and user support and specialized training.

The project has also established a shared-data infrastructure to support demographers housed in population centers funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and other demographic researchers.

DSDR is a partnership between NICHD, ICPSR, the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina, the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota, the Hopkins Population Center at Johns Hopkins University, the RAND Corporation, and the Population Studies Center at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan.

Data-PASS

Research Connections established

Bibliography of Data-related Literature published online

ICPSR moved to Perry Building

Gutmann named Executive Director

Myron Gutmann, previously director of the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, was named ICPSR director in 2001. He served until 2009, overseeing dramatic growth in grant funding and the creation of four new archives. Gutmann left ICPSR to become the head of the National Science Foundation’s Directorate for the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences.

Web downloads opened to all members

Halliman Winsborough named as interim director

Hal Winsborough, Professor of Sociology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, was appointed interim director for six months to fill in for Richard Rockwell. Winsborough joined the ICPSR Council in April 1996. He served as ICPSR Council Chair during the 1998-2000 Council cycle, and as Past Chair during the 2000-2002 Council cycle. Winsborough was instrumental in the creation of ICPSR as a separate center within ISR in 1998.

HMCA established

ICPSR became a center within the Institute for Social Research

Data made available for download

FTP downloads of data made available

IAED established

SAMHDA created

Funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, SAMHDA was home to some of ICPSR’s most popular datasets, such as the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, Monitoring the Future, and the National Comorbidity Study

First website posted

Richard Rockwell named Executive Director

Sociologist Richard C. Rockwell, previously a staff associate at the Social Science Research Council in New York and director of the Louis Harris Data Center at the University of North Carolina in the 1970s, served as ICPSR Executive Director from 1991 to 2000. His research interests were diverse and included global-scale environmental change, the social impact of the AIDS epidemic, and quantitative social science methodology. Now a Professor of Sociology at the University of Connecticut, Rockwell left ICPSR for a position as Director of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research from 2000-2004.

Rockwell’s term at ICPSR was notable for technological innovation: he encouraged ICPSR to transition from tape distribution of data to electronic means, including FTP, and to build a Web presence. Rockwell also brought in new externally funded archives focused on special topics and established the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) to create a metadata standard for the social sciences. Under his leadership, ICPSR was awarded a National Science Foundation Infrastructure in the Social Sciences grant.

Granda and Vardigan joined ICPSR staff

Peter Granda and Mary Vardigan joined ICPSR in 1985, and both have been with the consortium since then, shaping the organization for nearly 30 years.

Vardigan joined the staff as an editorial assistant, and took the consortium through the transition from print to Web-based communication. She was also instrumental in ICPSR’s efforts (in cooperation with several other social science groups) to develop the Data Documentation Initiative. In 2004, Vardigan was named Director of Collection Delivery and an assistant director of ICPSR.

Granda began in the General Archive working on converting two large datasets (the 1935-1937 Cost of Living Survey and State Legislative Election Returns), and since progressed through several research associate titles. In 1993, he was named Assistant Director of Archival Development, and in 2006, Acting Director of Collection Development. He current serves as Director of the General Archive, Director of the Health and Medical Care Archive, and Assistant Director, Collection Development.

Source: “ICPSR in Time, Space, and Context: A Personal History,” Eric W. Austin.

First diskette produced

Heitowit named director of Summer Program

Hank Heitowit assumed leadership of the Summer Program, a position he would hold for the next 27 years. Heitowit first joined ICPSR in 1971 as the Summer Program’s library coordinator. During his time as director, participation in the program grew from about 300 people to nearly 800.

NACDA established

The National Archive of Computerized Data on Aging was established as a project funded by the Administration on Aging. The first grants also involved the U-M Institute of Gerontology. NACDA is now funded by the National Institute on Aging, and provides access to data relevant to gerontological research.

Jerome Clubb named ICPSR director

Jerome Clubb, a historian, was Executive Director of ICPSR from 1975-1991 and directed the Program in Historical Politics in the 1970s. This program focused on the digitization of several bodies of data key to the study of electoral behavior. During Clubb’s tenure, the ICPSR data holdings diversified through the development of extensive data collections on international relations; voting records of plenary sessions and committees of the United Nations; records of the social, political, and economic attributes of nations; quality of life; crossnational comparative social indicators; and the roles of women. In the late 1970s Clubb also broadened the educational activities of ICPSR to include undergraduate instruction. ICPSR also experienced a constant growth in membership during Clubb’s term.

Source: Frantilla, Anne. Social Science in the Public Interest: A Fiftieth-Year History of the Institute for Social Research. University of Michigan, Bentley Historical Library, Bulletin No. 45, September 1998.

Name of ICPR changed to ICPSR

The name of the organization is changed to the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. In an e-mail interview in late 2011, Clubb described the change:

“…we undertook a continuing effort to change both the orientation and perceptions of the organization. Adding the word ‘social’ to the name might seem merely cosmetic, but it was also an expression of reality. Through various avenues, we called attention to the value of existing ICPSR data holdings and its summer program for disciplines and specializations other than political science. An aggressive search for funding beyond membership income allowed us to add data relevant to other research areas without neglecting political science. We invited individuals from diverse disciplines to join our advisory committees and to participate in our governing structure. We worked at making our operations and financial management more open to our governing council, to the representatives of member institutions, and to interested social scientists more generally.”

Machine-readable Guide to Resources and Services created

Erbring appointed Summer Program director

Hofferbert named executive director

Richard I. Hofferbert, who led ICPR from 1970 to 1975, was involved in the comparative study of public policy at state and local levels of government. He developed the dataset Socio-Economic, Public Policy, and Political Data for the United States, 1890-1960 and a comparative counterpart that covered selected demographic, social, economic, public policy, and political comparative data for Switzerland, Canada, France, and Mexico.

Hofferbert was also instrumental in making the German Electoral Data Project — a collaboration among ICPSR, the Zentralarchiv, and ZUMA — a success during the 1970s.
Sources: Frantilla, Anne. Social Science in the Public Interest: A Fiftieth-Year History of the Institute for Social Research. University of Michigan, Bentley Historical Library, Bulletin No. 45, September 1998. Kaase, Max. “Comment” in Crossroads of Social Science: The ICPSR 25th Anniversary Volume, edited by Heinz Eulau. New York, Agathon Press, 1989.

Historical Archive created

Magnetic tape replaced punch cards

First summer program held

The Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Research was created simultaneously with ICPR. The first program had approximately 20 faculty participants and 40 graduate student participants, and the instructors included the founders of ICPSR themselves: Warren Miller and Philip Converse.

Donald Stokes was the first director of the summer program.

ICPSR founded

ICPSR was founded as the Inter-university Consortium for Political Research (ICPR). The word “Social” was added to the title in 1975.

Warren E. Miller established the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research at the University of Michigan, and became its first executive director. A renowned scholar, he was one of the four co-authors of “The American Voter” (1960), a landmark work on voting behavior. The others were Drs. Angus Campbell, Philip E. Converse and Donald E. Stokes. Professor Miller was also the co-author, with J. Merrill Shanks, of “The New American Voter” (1996, Harvard University Press). The work examines diminishing voter turnout, evolving party-identification patterns and voting behavior. Miller also helped develop the field of quantitative political science, the use of surveys and computers to analyze political behavior. He was active for a long time in the American National Election Studies, a program that carries out vast surveys of voters before and after every national election. For more than 20 years, he was a principal investigator for the program, which is now supported by the National Science Foundation and has become almost an American institution. All scholars and students of American political behavior depend on the surveys.

Miller’s term as ICPSR director ended in 1970. In this document (pdf) from August 1962, Miller explains the concept behind ICPSR and its organization to Rensis Likert, director of the Institute for Social Research.

First annual OR meeting held

The first Annual Report (pdf) of the ICPR noted that the first gathering of Official Representatives reaffirmed the interest of the member institutions in four major objectives:

• The development of data resources
• The establishment of a formal training program for graduate students and faculty
• The stimulation and facilitation of new research
• The operation of an informational clearing house concerning ongoing research

Although the record does not perhaps make this clear, the various participants also understood that the proposed activities were additionally innovative in that the consortium research data would be maintained in the ICPR “repository” (the word “archive” was less used initially) and made available in machine readable form. Thus the search, identification, and recording phases that had been basic for all research scholars in the social sciences to this point were to become a community exercise in so far as certain types of important information were concerned. This simple fact was to be fully as revolutionary in its implications and results as the statistical methods used in the analysis of the data.

Source: Blalock Report (pdf), ICPSR Review Committee, June 1989

Survey Data Archive established

Creating a central location to access research data was an important innovation, as indicated in this article by Philip Converse in Public Opinion Quarterly, 1964.

“Among the remaining bottlenecks to a more efficient harnessing of information production, perhaps the principal one is the current lag in the social organization of the research community, which leaves us with little in the way of institutional bases for the orderly accumulation of behavioral science data and for the broad facilitation of access to such material. One example of many that might be cited will serve to illustrate the point. For several decades historians and political scientists in this country and abroad have labored over aggregate voting records, painstakingly locating dispersed sources and hand-compiling data for this or that sequence of elections in this or that portion of the country. It was inevitable that duplication of effort was large, although given the medium in which researchers compiled their information, there was little remedy for the problem save for the occasional publication of some of the grosser returns. However, the great flexibilities of duplication and transmission of information permitted by the new technology can now justify the systematic archival accumulation of voting statistics in permanent and machine-manipulable form, on an expanding time base and in growing geographical depth (both cross-nationally and intra-nationally down to smaller and smaller civil subdivisions). Indeed, the Social Science Research Council has expressed interest in such a data accumulation effort, and has granted funds to Walter Dean Burnham, now of Haverford College, to collect certain gross returns back to 1824, and to assess costs involved in retrieving and organizing the American materials in still greater depth. Yet one of the problems faced by any agency in promoting a general-purpose collection of this sort has been the absence of any obvious place to locate the materials once they have been organized. Naturally, there would be no dearth of institutions welcoming the gift of such a collection. But there have been no clearly appropriate institutions already “tooled up” to promote easy access to such materials on the part of any interested member of the behavioral science research community.

This is the organizational bottleneck and the problem of effective data archives. This article is intended to reflect the thoughts and activities of one group that has recently been working on the problem. In June of 1962 the Inter-university Consortium for Political Research was constituted with a membership of twenty-one major American universities (now thirty-eight), and goals of speeding behavioral research in the policy sciences through intensified training and archival developments.”

Source: Philip E. Converse. “A Network of Data Archives for the Behavioral Sciences.” (pdf) Public Opinion Quarterly, Summer 1964; 28: 273-286.