ICPSR wins grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

ICPSR and partners at the University of Michigan received a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation recently.  You can find the official link here.

 The link says that the grant is to house and make available to qualified researchers the data collected by the Measures of Effective Teaching project, and than means that you'll soon see yet another ICPSR operated web portal.

In addition to building and operating the portal, the project also requires us to process, preserve, and deliver quantitative data related to the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project, which is right in ICPSR's wheelhouse, of course.  The really new element for us, though, is the collection of video and "artifacts" related to the video.

ICPSR will use its existing Restricted Contract System (RCS) to screen applicants who want to access the video collection.  If approved the applicant will be able to access a video streaming server to view the videos in the collection.  The applicant will also be able to access the quantitative data in our Virtual Data Enclave (VDE).

The video collection is large compared to our current holdings of survey and government data.  My sense is that our collection will pretty much double in size, approaching 20TB total.  That's very big for us, but not nearly as big as some collections of video.