What is the purpose of this site?

Our goal is to maintain a Web site where researchers will find a compendium of the computing information necessary for conducting social science research at Duke. This includes pointers to departmental, shared or contributed central resources (like servers, clusters, software packages, data depositories and libraries) and services available through departmental and central support. We will focus on issues related to the processing of datasets in UNIX or PC environments. Other computing support areas are left to the respective departmental computer support channels, to which we provide pointers. Whether your visit is to learn what data depositories are available, to locate certain datasets, to decide where to store them, or to determine how to solve a particular computational problem with the in-house resources available, we hope that you'll find useful pointers here and welcome suggestions for additions.

A guiding principle is recognition of the need for cooperative efforts among departmental system administrators and A&SIST central staff. This allows for a broader range of resources and services, scaled to the widely varying needs of researchers. There have been and always will be researchers who rely exclusively on departmental computing resources. Others have need for higher capacity computing resources, which are not easily delivered at the departmental level but which can be provided as shared, central resources. Our aim is to describe the spectrum into which each researcher can fit according to his or her needs.