DATA BANKS AND DEPOSITORIESpublic administration and the scientific communi-
ty to the use of social indicators as standards for
the population welfare level. These social actors
turned to social indicators for help in planning,
applying, and the evaluating public-assistance pro-
grams when it became apparent that using eco-
nomic indicators alone was insufficient and
inappropriate.
The first major contribution of social indica-
tors is the Recent Social Trendsstudy, supervised by
the sociologist William Ogburn and prescribed by
the U.S. Government toward the end of the 1920s
(Bauer 1966). In 1946 the Employment Act was
published, which was a systematic collection of
information on economy intended to affect poli-
cies and programs that would sustain employment
rates. Most of the studies and undertakings of the
1960s described a ‘‘great society,’’ which could
overcome the widening economic and social gap.
The consciousness of social problems, togeth-
er with the necessity of endowing a collection of
social data, prompted the publication of Towards a
Social Report at the end of the 1960s (Olson 1974).
This publication was intended to be ‘‘a first step
toward the evolution of a regular system in social
reporting;’’ but still, like other similar and contem-
porary writings, data were used just as illustrations
supplementing the text.
Technological developments that contributed
to the establishment of SSDA include previously
unseen data collection techniques and new quanti-
tative methods to organize and analyze those same
data. Throughout the 1960s improvements in com-
puting technologies, specifically in data gathering
and storing, allowed researchers to do previously
unthinkable levels of analysis (Deutsch 1970).
The first SSDA were born autonomously, un-
restricted by publicly administered archives or by
the institutions traditionally related to the collec-
tion and promotion of data (libraries, museums,
and data archives). The earliest SSDA were created
in the United States, where in 1947 the Roper
Public Opinion Research Center opened, followed
by the Inter-University Consortium for Political
and Social Research (ICPSR) in 1962 at the Univer-
sity of Michigan in Ann Arbor. In 1960, the Univer-
sity of Koln in Germany developed the Zentralarchiv
fur Empirische Sozialforschung (ZA). A few years
later, in 1964, the Steinmetzarchief settled in at the
Amsterdam Arts and Sciences Real Academy. The
Economic and Social Research Council Data Ar-
chive (ESRC-DA) was created at the University of
Essex in 1967. These archives specialized in public
opinion surveys and social research, but they also
focused attention on the great amount of data
complied by statistical bureaus and public agen-
cies (Herichsen 1989).SSDA developed a culture of data sharing;
data exchange and the repeated use of available
data for new research projects intensified with the
introduction of statistical packages for the social
sciences and more compact media for data trans-
fer. As data production and SSDA grew, more
systematic acquisition policies were implemented,
and transborder cooperation resulted in the ex-
change of data processing tools and of emerging
archiving and service standards (Mochmann 1998).In the early 1970s SSDA were created: in
Norway in 1971, in Denmark in 1973, and in the
United States (at the University of Wisconsin in
Madison, U.C.L.A., and the University of North
Carolina in Chapel Hill). In the 1980s SSDA were
created in Sweden (1980), France (1981), Austria
(1985), and then Canada, Hungary, Israel, Austral-
ia, New Zealand, and Switzerland (1993).Currently, the most important SSDA is the
ICPSR at the University of Michigan, which has
over 40,000 data files and gathers information
from more than 300 institutions. Besides data
retrieval, processing, researching, and transfer-
ring, it publishes an annual catalog and a four-
monthly bulletin, cooperates in great projects con-
cerning data collection (e.g. the General Social
Surveys and the Panel Study on Income Dynamics),
conducts formative training (it organizes a sum-
mer school on methodology and statistics for so-
cial science), and offers educational activities. The
ICPSR has been open to foreign institutions since
the early 1970s.SSDA differ on budget and staff size, func-
tions, amount of data files in acrhives, and techni-
cal characteristics (e.g. type of hardware and soft-
ware used, online data accessibility) (IFDO 1991).
The SSDA network is tied, however, by interna-
tional associations such as the Council of Europe-
an Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA was
instituted in 1976 to facilitate cooperation be-
tween the most important European SSDA), and