With partial National Science Foundation support the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) will purchase two Sun SPARCserver 1000 machines with 128 MB of expansion memory, a high-speed (FDDI) bus connecting them, and options to integrate this into their existing computer system. This addition will provide a significant upgrade in computing and permit the organization to meet its current and projected needs. ICPSR is a consortium of 325 member universities and colleges in the United States and Canada with additional national members in Europe, Latin America and elsewhere. Based at the University of Michigan, ICPSA acquires social science data from all over the world. It processes and documents the data so that many different persons with different levels of expertise can undertake research on them and then makes the product available in electronic form. ICPSR has created standard formats for data sets and data documentation which make the data useable in a variety of settings and these standards are now widely used in the social sciences. These data are distributed in forms that are compatible with current computing technology in many varieties. ICPSR's current file server, a Sun 4/690MP is now four generations of CPU chips old and in need of replacement. Social scientists increasingly conduct complex statistical analyses on large data sets and such information is crucial for advances in this field. ICPSR plays an extremely important role in making such materials available and this award will prove of benefit to many researchers in a broad range of institutions.
