Year in Review

Highlights of 2010-2011

The past year was a busy and productive one for ICPSR. Below are some of the highlights:

ICPSR agrees to partnership with Renmin University

In January 2011, a delegation from Renmin University in Beijing visited Ann Arbor and signed a partnership agreement with ICPSR to become a hub for distributing ICPSR data to other institutions in China. Under the agreement, ICPSR also will help Renmin University develop user support capabilities for Chinese-speaking users.

The seven-member Renmin delegation, including Professor Yuan Wei, Senior Vice President of the university and director of its National Survey Research Center, met with ICPSR Director George Alter, General Archive Director Peter Granda, Assistant Director Mary Vardigan, and Director of Marketing and Membership Linda Detterman.

Wei said there is increased attention to sharing research data in China, and that Renmin is essentially creating a new data archive from the ground up.

Alter said developing a relationship with Renmin University was important to ICPSR: "We strongly support their efforts to encourage the social sciences in China, and to build data archiving and analysis facilities for Chinese researchers."

ICPSR also has similar agreements with members in China and Hong Kong, including a federation coordinated by Beijing University.

ICPSR earns Data Seal of Approval

In June 2011, ICPSR became one of the first six data repositories to earn the Data Seal of Approval.

The seal was created by the Data Archiving and Networked Services archive in The Netherlands, and is overseen by an international board. It is intended to demonstrate that data repositories take appropriate measures to ensure the long-term availability and quality of the data they hold.

The seal is awarded based on an online self-assessment regarding a data repository's adherence to a set of 16 guidelines related to trustworthy data management and stewardship.

The other five repositories receiving the seal were the Archaeology Data Service (United Kingdom); the DANS Electronic Archiving System (Netherlands); the Platform for Archiving CINES (France); the Language Archive of the Max Planck Institute; and the UK Data Archive.

Researchers participate in National Digital Stewardship Alliance

ICPSR is playing an active role in a new data stewardship initiative sponsored by the U.S. Library of Congress.

Several ICPSR researchers attended the first meeting of the National Data Stewardship Alliance in Washington, D.C., in December 2010, and were involved in various working groups leading up to the conference. These working groups continue to meet regularly.

The NDSA, a collaboration between government agencies, educational institutions, non-profits and businesses, is an outgrowth of the National Data Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP). NDSA's goal is to preserve a distributed national digital collection.

The ICPSR researchers who are part of NDSA working groups include: Peter Granda, director of the General Archive; Digital Preservation Officer Nancy McGovern; Computing & Network Services Director Bryan Beecher; Assistant Director Mary Vardigan; and Research Area Specialist Jared Lyle.

Preparations under way for 50th anniversary celebration

This year, ICPSR staff began preparing for a year-long celebration of ICPSR's 50th anniversary, which will kick off in October at the biennial Official Representatives meeting in Ann Arbor. The event will feature a symposium on "The Next 50 Years of Social Science Data" with an address by Myron Gutmann, Assistant Director for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences at the National Science Foundation and discussion with several ICPSR Council members and other prominent figures in the data community.

We are also planning several celebratory receptions at professional associations' annual meetings over the next year, including the American Sociological Association, the American Political Science Association, the Social Science History Association, the American Economic Association, the Population Association of America, and IASSIST.

On the University of Michigan campus, the celebration will include the October 2011 symposium, an open house at the Perry Building in January 2012, and a series of brown-bag lunches for departments within the university that may find ICPSR's services useful.

The events will culminate in June 2012 with a symposium and banquet featuring Nobel laureate and former ICPSR Council member Elinor Ostrom, Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political Science at Indiana University.

ICPSR secures new projects

• An agreement to archive data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's "Moving to Opportunity" (MTO) project. MTO was a demonstration program conducted from 1994-2001 intended to track what happens to very poor families when they move out of subsidized housing in the poorest neighborhoods of five very large American cities. Users may order this collection by completing an application to obtain restricted-use data.
• Second-year funding for Digital Preservation Officer Nancy McGovern to continue her leadership role in the Library of Congress' Digital Preservation Outreach and Education program. McGovern serves as the lead partner in the initiative, developing recommendations based on a survey of training needs within the digital preservation community and a gap analysis of existing continuing education programs.
• A new contract with Abt Associates to provide technical assistance to grantees of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality for research on patients with complex combinations of diseases. Amy Pienta, ICPSR Acquisitions Director, is directing the project, in which ICPSR will assist recipients of R21 and R24 grants funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in creating and disseminating public-access datasets resulting from their research.