Data Portal Highlight: ICPSR

The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR)

Hosted at the University of Michigan, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) is a consortia of over 800 academic and research groups with a mandate to collect and archive data. It provides access to over 500,000 data files for researchers in the social and behavioural sciences, from over 20,000 studies. In addition to offering historical data going back several centuries, searchable as a whole or by topic, it provides a space for researchers to deposit their own data for others to reuse. The consortia also offers plenty of online training resources via their Youtube channel, in addition to hosting regular live sessions and larger conferences and events.

Preserving at-risk Data Collections

Earlier this year, when the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) ended it’s education program, members of the ICPSR community joined forces to salvage and publish over 2500 files related to 43 countries. Work is ongoing to strengthen this collection, available via ICPSR's DataLumos archive, and to encourage knowledge of and access to this rich resource.  More information on this exciting project can be found in the article, "All is not lost: USAID’s education data has been preserved," from What Works Hub for Global Education, authored by ICPSR's Erin Meyer and others. 

Working with ICPSR Data

We encourage you to check out this new collection, and the many other thematic and topical collections that are offered by ICPSR! If you need support with getting started, MDL would be happy to help.