Charting the Future: ICPSR's 20+ Years of Digital Preservation and Beyond

The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), the world’s largest social science data repository, developed its formal digital preservation program nearly 20 years ago, around the same time as the start of the iPRES conference. While ICPSR had conducted preservation activities since its founding in 1962 and subsequent moves from punch cards to magnetic tapes to hard disk drives, it conscientiously professionalized and standardized digital preservation work after the recommendation of a 2004 external process review committee report. 

This poster outlines improvements ICPSR has made over the past 20 years, especially in the following areas: organizational readiness, storage, metadata interoperability, file integrity, and file format identification.