Peter Granda

1
ICPSR and the Gerald R. Ford Presidential
Library Two Decades of Collaboration

• Peter Granda
• Archival Assistant Director

http//www.icpsr.umich.edu/
2
What I plan to discuss

• Case study of collaboration between two different
  kinds of archives
• How the collaboration began
• What was accomplished
• Current activities
• Advantages of this collaboration for ICPSR and
  for the research community

3
ICPSR and the Ford Library Earlier Collaboration

• Preamble a case study in the spirit of recent
  New Skills for a Digital Era colloquium
  recently held by SAA
• Digitization of records from NARA
• Creating Digital Objects Why do so and how
  done
• Cost of Living in the United States, 1917-1919
• Study of Consumer Purchases, 1935-1936

4
(No Transcript)
5
(No Transcript)
6
ICPSR and the Ford Library Earlier
Accomplishments

• Creation of two quantitative data collections
  ready for use by the social science research
  community
• New historical resource for researchers
• Deed of gift of new digital versions of paper
  records to NARA
• SIGNIFICANT increase in usage of the research
  facilities at the Ford Library!!!

7
ICPSR and the Ford Library Current Activities

• Papers of Robert M. Teeter Survey Researcher
  and Campaign Strategist for Presidents Nixon and
  Ford Political Advisor to George H.W. Bush
• Born-digital materials of a certain kind
• Importance of these materials?
• What to do with them?

8
Teeter materials of interest to ICPSR

• Coded numeric data representing responses to
  survey questions stored in a format that can be
  read by standard software statistical packages
  (e.g., SAS, SPSS, Stata)
• Printouts of tables generated by such software
• Questionnaires, reports, and other materials
  associated with the conduct of these surveys

9
Record Appraisal

• Basic question Should records which serve
  different research purposes and different
  analytic strategies reside in the same archive?
• How to coordinate appraisal responsibilities
  between two archives?
• What steps should these archives take to inform
  each other of the appraisal decisions that they
  make to ingest various types of records?

10
Descriptive Standards

• ICPSR metadata standards
• Bibliographic citations/MARC compatibility?
• Defining and describing the differences in
  archival objects when records vary
  significantly in structure and type
• Make certain that there are permanent connections
  between these objects and that these connections
  are visible to users

11
Digital Preservation

• Obvious differences in preserving digital vs.
  paper records the meaning of original
  materials
• Are any of the Teeter paper records suitable for
  the creation of electronic versions?
• Survey questionnaires
• Computer tabulations
• Reports
• Continuous preservation necessary to assure
  continuous access

12
User Access

• From my point of view the biggest advantage of
  this type of collaboration
• Researcher access to the fullest set of records
  in formats most suitable for investigation and
  analysis
• Integrate portions of Web sites so that users can
  easily navigate between the two
• Connect all record types together For example,
  user finds interesting poll to analyze and also
  can obtain Teeter analyses and reports based on
  this poll

13
Conclusions

• Shared responsibilities for preservation, record
  management, and user support
• Shared resources have archives do what they do
  best
• Use coordinated set of finding aids to facilitate
  searching by researchers
• Provide resource-rich response to such research
  questions as
• Can I trace the history of political polling over
  the last 30 years to see how it has affected
  national campaigns?
• How have political polls used advances in survey
  methodology to increase their accuracy and value?
• How have these polls affected the public
  regarding survey response rates?