Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) Data at Duke

ICPSR is the largest repository for data in the social sciences. It is a membership organization based in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan. Most major research universities in the United States and other industrialized countries are members. Each member university is entitled to unlimited access of the ICPSR holdings. The institutionally paid Duke membership provides researchers free access to ICPSR data.

ICPSR uses a highly automated system to make its holdings available to member institutions over the Internet. Each member is responsible for organizing local data services under the oversight of an Official Representative (OR) it appoints who is provided access to the ICPSR distribution mechanism.

At Duke ICPSR data are organized under the auspices of the Social Science Data Center, based in the Department of Sociology and managed by Bob Jackson, who is the Duke Official Representative to ICPSR. He orders, locally archives and manages the data holdings. Studies downloaded from ICPSR are stored on a file server which is part of the Office of Information Technology ACPUB UNIX system. Data holdings are directly accessible from the ACPUB system and the Sociology, Economics and central Arts and Sciences UNIX compute servers. Working in collaboration with Christof Galli, the Social Science Data Librarian in the Public Documents and Maps Department of Perkins Library, a web-based search engine has been developed for determining which studies are locally available and retrieving access information about those of interest.

• How to Find ICPSR Data
• How to Request ICPSR Data
• How to Access ICPSR Data