News Release

By JIM WALSH
UNC News Services

CHAPEL HILL -- In the digital age, much of the country’s history found in polls and surveys is erased in the blink of a cursor – but efforts are under way to preserve America’s past.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Howard W. Odum Institute for Research in Social Science is a part of those efforts.

The Library of Congress recently made a three-year award to the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, UNC’s Odum Institute and four other institutions to collaborate on a national project to archive digital poll and survey data, which are often lost after publication. The total award, including cost sharing, is $4.1 million.

Data to be archived include opinion polls, voting records and surveys from the social sciences. The project is an outgrowth of the Library of Congress’ mandate to create a National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program.

"We have a real problem with the way digital data are being treated," said Dr. Ken Bollen, director of the Odum Institute. "People often see it as less valuable than books; they’re less concerned with it."

Many cases exist in which information is left behind. America’s unprecedented growth after World War II was accompanied by the rise of private organizations that dealt in the production and analysis of data. However, these private organizations perform much of their work under contract with agencies that may not require that the data be archived, Odum Institute officials said.

For example, Bollen said that after Sept. 11, 2001, one firm polled nationally to compare contemporary American attitudes to those prevalent after another American tragedy, the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The firm had difficulty finding the digital data of the 1963 poll, which contained Americans’ responses to their earlier questionnaire, he said. (It was eventually located in a warehouse.)

Besides UNC, other partners working with the University of Michigan in the data retention project are University of Connecticut’s Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, the Harvard Radcliffe Institute’s Henry A. Murray Research Center, the National Archives and Records Administration and the Harvard-MIT Data Center.

Each institution will share responsibility for preserving different at-risk information sources that are of national historical or cultural value. In its role as a partner, the Odum Institute will focus on the following components: securing digital data from "classic" social science studies, gathering information from private social science research organizations (such as RTI International in Research Triangle Park), archiving Harris Poll data and cataloging state polls from across the nation.

The project is in its initial stages, Bollen said. Faced with a lot of information and limited time, he added, the Odum Institute will need to prioritize data and decide what is the most important information to be saved. Data collected by the Odum Institute will be stored in Chapel Hill.

"We will be the primary holder of that, but we will readily share it with other institutions," Bollen said.

The Odum Institute maintains the country’s third-largest archive of computer-readable social science data. Bollen said the Odum Institute hopes the institutions’ work will change the way future generations review history.

"The representativeness of our samples and the types of data we’ve collected in the past 20 or 30 years are unlike any other," said Bollen. "Could you imagine if we had representative samples and good survey data from the Roman Empire or from the Russian revolutionary period?

"Our goal is to help to preserve this type of information about our contemporary era for future generations."

Founded by Dr. Howard W. Odum in 1924 "for the cooperative study of problems in the general field of social science," the Odum Institute was the nation’s first multidisciplinary social science research institute based at a university.

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(Walsh is a sophomore journalism major from Winston-Salem.)

Note: Contact Bollen at (919) 843-5990.

News Services contact: Deb Saine, (919) 962-8415 or deborah_saine@unc.edu