ICPSR Launches New Website

It's alive!

The new web site launched a bit after 5pm EDT today. So far, so good.

There's a nice summary of the new features and capabilities on the home page of the site.

In brief, though, we've moved our search platform to the open source Solr system, and that allows us to use a single search technology for the many different types of content we deliver (studies, variables, citations, etc).

We also make use of blogger as our technology for managing frequently updated content like announcements.

And it's also easier than ever to download content - a button on the home page of a study downloads the entire thing with a single click.

We hope you enjoy the new web site!

ICPSR: Then and Now

As many of you have already heard, Myron Gutmann, the director of ICPSR, has accepted a position with the National Science Foundation, and will be leaving ICPSR at the end of October. If you have not heard the news, here is a link to the press release.

With the departure of Myron and the start of a new academic year, the time feels right for a retrospective series of posts. I'm intending to post two or three per week over the next few weeks, and the general theme will be "ICPSR: Then and Now."

Myron hired me in September 2002, and so late 2002 will form the bulk of my "then" for this series. We'll take a brief stroll down memory lane, looking at how ICPSR - and especially technology at ICPSR - has changed over the past seven years.