This proposal is for developing a Virtual Data Center (VDC) for managing and sharing numerical social science data for teaching and research purposes across multiple institutions. This project will refine and extendthe prototype data server developed by the Harvard-MIT Data Center and turn it into a free, portable software product that will integrate with other data centers and library databases by supporting a variety of communication and interoperation protocols. The project is unique in serving as a public resource offering an open set of tools, and as a way to test and adapt previous digital library research to the rigors of a production environment. The project will be one of the first to address a number of digital library issues in a production environment, and will serve as a production framework for other types of digital libraries.
