Abstract
DOI: 10.12685/027.7-2-1-49The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) was founded over 50 years ago "to further the development of research in political science" (Miller 1963:11). Since that summer of 1962, the scope and range of services ICPSR offers has expanded significantly to encompass the wider social and behavioral research community, and from a handful of data collections to thousands. With over 750 consortial members from around the world, ICPSR is now a leader in preserving, curating, and providing access to scientific data so others can reuse the data and validate research findings. Much of the success of ICPSR can be traced back to the consortial model upon which the organization was founded, with members providing funding, input, and a sense of community. This article describes the history and current status of the consortium, and discusses upcoming challenges and opportunities.
Highlights
The brainchild of renowned political scientist Warren Miller, the "Inter-university Consortium for Political Research"1 was organized to archive and distribute the growing data collections generated in machine-readable formats, including the 1962 Congressional elections
ISSN: 2296-0597 with the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan to further the development of research in political science" (ICPSR 1963)
Members initially came from the United States, each paying $2,500 in annual membership fees (Austin 2007), with international members joining in the years immediately following
Summary
The brainchild of renowned political scientist Warren Miller, the "Inter-university Consortium for Political Research" was organized to archive and distribute the growing data collections generated in machine-readable formats, including the 1962 Congressional elections. ICPSR’s growing Summer Program for training in quantitative methodology, established to train and connect with the upcoming generations of social scientists, was another revenue source This diversified funding was critical to ICPSR’s financial viability given later economic ebbs and flows caused by government cutbacks and fiscal stringency at member institutions. Collection development at ICPSR originally balanced collecting significant existing survey data with aggregating "data bearing on political and social phenomena in historical depth." (Austin 2007) Regarding criteria for acquired data, Council meeting minutes from October 1962 specified: Acquired data should have some obvious value either (1) as being sufficiently rich conceptually to bear heavy secondary analysis; (2) as training materials; and (3) as referring to sufficiently significant units of analysis (e.g., nation rather than some single country or community) that the material would provide benchmarks for later longitudinal study of change. We feel that the potentially wide use of collected data, made possible by the Consortium, necessitates reducing ambiguities and inconsistencies insofar as possible." (ICPSR 1963)
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