U-M, Columbia partner on $7.5M child care research archive

Parents and policy makers soon will be able to tap into a new federally funded online archive to find the latest and most trustworthy academic research on child care.

The system, which also will aid child care providers, is being developed at U-M's Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), with the initial version of the Web site expected to be accessible by early 2004.

ICPSR, part of the Institute for Social Research, is developing the searchable, Web-based archive in collaboration with Columbia University as part of a new $7.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

"ICPSR is committed to providing online access to research data in the vital area of child care," says ICPSR director Myron Gutmann, principal investigator on the archive. "We are working with our partners at Columbia to create an easily searchable Web site that will serve as a valuable resource for information-based decision making by policy makers and parents who are interested in the best possible child care for America's children."

The grant is the latest example of a move to expand access to archived information by making data available to users beyond the academic community.

Within the last year, ICPSR and other academic data archives have begun to offer instant, online data analysis of more than 100 data sets on topics from crime victimization to political attitudes and health behaviors, allowing the general public, teachers, journalists and policy analysts to generate color-coded tables showing frequencies, cross-tabs, even multiple regressions and comparisons of correlations—capacities which used to be the sole purview of academics with advanced statistical training.

For more information on online data analysis, visit the ICSPR Web site at http://www.icpsr.umich.edu.

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