News Releases

The UM-ISR Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) is establishing an open-access archive, DataLumos, where the public can archive valuable government data resources, ensuring their long-term availability.

ICPSR, a center within the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, has joined widespread efforts to preserve valuable US government data that may be hard to find or inaccessible in the future.

“We are committed to ensuring that valuable data resources remain accessible and discoverable in the future,” said ICPSR Director Margaret Levenstein, who added that members of the research community can help prioritize a list of valued data resources via the ICPSR DataLumos Recommendation Form.

Data preservation efforts have mounted at libraries and universities around the US to keep federal government datasets available to the public. More than 275 volunteers from U-M and around the community gathered in Ann Arbor in January in local efforts to preserve government data.

ICPSR had a webinar at noon (EST) on Friday, Feb. 17, to talk about efforts to ensure data remains available, and to answer attendees’ questions about the DataLumos project.

Coincidentally, this data archive launch coincides with “Love Your Data Week 2017.” The webinar takes place on Friday, which is dedicated to “Rescuing Unloved Data” More on this international data event is found here.

About ICPSR

ICPSR is an international consortium of more than 760 academic institutions and research organizations. The world’s largest archive of digital social science data, ICPSR maintains more than 500,000 files of research, including specialized collections of data in education, aging, criminal justice, substance abuse, terrorism, and other fields.

For more information

ICPSR Data Lumos Recommendation Form
Data Lumos repository in openICPSR

Contact

Dory Knight-Ingram, [email protected]
[email protected]