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Metadata Records

General Information

ICPSR has produced study descriptions, or metadata records, describing its holdings since the organization began in 1962. In the 1980s the metadata records were converted to a standardized, fielded text format, and they remained in that form until relatively recently. In 1999, ICPSR received an NSF Infrastructure in the Social Sciences award (SES-9977984), which enabled us to enrich the content of the records and to convert them to XML. The first XML records were produced to be compliant with the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) Version 1.0 tag set. The records now comply with DDI Version 2.0.

Some researchers and librarians find it useful to have access to our metadata records, and so ICPSR strives to make these files available. The pages linked below describe how to obtain those files, some of the eccentricities of the formats, and changes we make to the metadata files over time.

Conditions of Use

ICPSR shares its metadata records with the membership to promote wider awareness and use of ICPSR's social science data resources. In particular, we encourage members to integrate the records into local Online Public Access Catalogs (OPACs) intended primarily for the use of faculty, staff, and students at their institutions.

Individuals downloading the ICPSR metadata records must comply with the following terms:

  • When incorporating the records into a local catalog or Web site, the records must contain links back to the ICPSR site to ensure proper branding and to familiarize users with ICPSR. Please note that all ICPSR metadata recorcds, whether XML or MARC, contain the URL for the resource.

  • The catalog or site must contain the date of download of the records from ICPSR so that users can determine how recent the information is. Every effort should be taken to keep the records up to date.

  • The records may not be redistributed, repackaged, or sold without ICPSR permission.

  • The records may not be used to create unauthorized replications of the ICPSR site.

  • The records may not be used to derive revenue.

  • When downloading the records for research purposes, the conditions specified in the ICPSR Bylaws and the ICPSR Responsible Use Statement apply to the research. These conditions include appropriate attribution and citation.

Requests for permission to use ICPSR metadata in ways not specified above must be approved by the ICPSR Council Committee on Archival Development. To contact this group, please send email to Peter Granda (peterg@icpsr.umich.edu).

Obtaining ICPSR Metadata

Pursuant to the conditions specified above, ICPSR metadata is available in two formats:

If you have any technical questions about ICPSR's metadata, please contact web-support@icpsr.umich.edu.

New Initiatives

Federated Search

ICPSR understands the need to integrate searches on local campuses so that users are not confronted with multiple systems and searches. Accordingly, we are investigating metadata harvesting protocols and other methods for facilitating distributed searches across sites and resources. We will keep the community apprised of our progress in this area.

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