Recording from the Research Data Stewardship Initiative (RDSI) Community of Practice event held on April 24, 2025: "Rescuing Lost Government Data: ICPSR’s Role in Preserving U.S. Federal Government Data Resources."
The federal government does not have and to RDSI’s knowledge, has never had, a mandate to preserve the data they create and disseminate. As one of the world’s oldest and largest data archives for social and behavioral sciences, ICPSR is in a unique position to be able to ensure the long-term viability of the data that are at risk or already removed. Specifically, our mission is to preserve data as well as make it available at a given point in time. ICPSR’s infrastructure guarantees the data can be found through descriptive metadata, used and archived for future retrieval, should the need arise.
This talk will discuss the efforts taken since late January 2025 to acquire and preserve data that were at risk of being made unavailable. This overview aims to lead to an engaging conversation about what was done and what needs to be done.
David L. Thomas, Senior Data Project Manager, ICPSR
David Thomas has been with ICPSR since 2003 and a University of Michigan employee since 2001. As a processing supervisor, he supervises staff in both the General Archive and RCMD. He began his ICPSR career by processing ABC News/Washington Post and CBS News/New York Times polls. Now, his team is responsible for processing public opinion polls for ICPSR. In addition to polling data, his team processes the National Election Pool data, the American National Election Survey data, American Community Survey, and the Latino National Survey for ICPSR.
Erin Meyer, Senior Data Project Manager, ICPSR
Erin Meyer is a Project Management and User Support Lead at ICPSR. Since joining ICPSR in 2020, she has worked on numerous social science data projects, with recent projects focused on record linkage methodology, access barriers for the Federal Statistical Research Data Centers (FSRDC), and the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP) survey. Prior to joining ICPSR, Erin processed public and restricted-use Census data with IPUMS USA at the University of Minnesota.