The Decades of My Life

The development of data archives and of local data libraries and
the growth of IASSIST and associated organizations are a result of
the growth of quantitative social and behavioral sciences. This
growth in turn was made possible by the development of computers and
of statistics.

I have attempted to place these events in a larger social and
political context. In order to do this I have taken advantage of the
large number of magazine and newspaper articles and the even larger
number of web pages which are currently reviewing the twentieth
century.

I really enjoyed looking back over this history and I only regret
that I have had to omit so many names and so many events. I make no
apologies for the fact that my emphasis is American; my memories are
largely American. Nor do I claim that the names and events I have
included are the most significant. Others might present a very
different history.

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I begin in the 1930's because that's when I was born, the decade in
which I started elementary school where I fought for the right of
girls to wear slacks...the beginning of my career as an advocate.

THE 1930's

brought passenger airlines, LIFE magazine, Monopoly, Mickey Mouse
and Snow White, the Great Depression, a ready market for data
processing equipment, and Japan's invasion of China. Hitler rose to
power in Germany and there were other brands of fascism elsewhere.

The electron microscope was developed at the University of Toronto
and the Dionne quintuplets were born and the Literary Digest poll of
1936 predicted Landon over Roosevelt.

Unit record equipment based on Jacquard weaving cards had been
developed more than 30 years earlier by Herman Hollerith to analyze
the 1890 census in the United States and was still in use.
This equipment included numeric keypunches, sorters, and later,
accounting machines and the famous 101 widely used to tabulate
polling results.

The Englishman Turing defined "the Turing machine," Vannevar
Bush developed an anolog computer and the first truly digital
electronic computer was built in Iowa.

The Lynds, Lloyd Warner and others were doing community studies
in Middletown and Yankee City.

Morris Hanson began the development of large-scale sampling but
the Gallup Polls were begun by George Gallup using "quota samples."

Attitude measurement matured under the Allports, Lickert and Bogardus.

Public Opinion Quarterly was started in 1937.

New economic censuses and national surveys of unemployment and crop
production were initiated and the Brookings Institution was a going
concern.

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THE 1940's

saw the U.S. allied with Europe on both the Western and Asian
fronts, women at work in factories, offices,and such military units
as the WACS and the WRENS.

All over the world soldiers became students, the oldest cadre of
students the world has ever known. Many European and Asian countries
had seen their records of government destroyed and the post-war
period provided an opportunity to begin anew. Israel was established
as a Jewish state, Mao proclaimed the establishment of the People's
Republic of China and Newfoundland became Canada's tenth province.

The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the UN were
founded by 1945 and W. Edwards Deming commuted to Japan weekly to
organize their census and to teach the principles of quality control.

MARK I, programmed by paper tape, was followed by ENIAC,
developed by Eckert and Mauchley at the University of Pennsylvania.
This was followed in turn by EDVAC, EDSAC, ILIAC, JOHNIAC and MADM.
The transistor was invented in 1947 and magnetic core memory in 1949.

In 1946 the Roper Center was created at Williams College as a home
for Gallup, Crossley and Roper Polls, some from as early as 1936.
The Center was run for decades by Philip and Elizabeth Hastings.

Angus Campbell began work on attitude surveys and opinion polling
and the forerunner of The American National Election Surveys
were completed in 1944.

Immediately after the election in which the pollsters chose Dewey
over Truman the Social Science Research Council appointed a
committee chaired by Fred Stephan and S.S.Wilks to find out why.

Samuel Stouffer completed the monumental American Soldier study,
data for which are now available from Roper. When Stouffer died
Harvard sent the cards for the American Soldier to Roper. It was not
until the late 70's that the Department of Defense provided funding
to read the cards to tape, develop codebooks and send a copy to
National Archives.

Guttman commenced his work on scaling theory and Deutsch, Russett
and Merritt on quantitative models of nationalism and integration.
Stouffer, Lazersfeld and Anderson developed multivariate analytic
techniques based on the work of Pearson, Yule and Fisher.

The Rand Corporation, the Urban Institute and NORC were all
established.

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I got married in the 1950's while a graduate student at Yale. I then
spent several years learning about marketing research and Hungarian
cooking while my husband served in the U.S. Navy and before the
decade was over I became the mother of two sons.

THE 1950's

saw women back in the home, mid-calf skirts replacing mid-knee
skirts, men in grey flannel suits, the beginning of the baby boom.
Later in the decade Xerox manufactured a plain paper copier which
quickly replaced the ditto and the mimeograph, the seeds of the
civil rights and womens' movements were planted, McCarthy ran riot
through Hollywood,the universities and on TV and the polarization of
East and West resulted in the "cold war."

Germany and Japan industrialized and the centralizing of
governments required more data for every purpose. Stalin died, the
Warsaw Pact was signed and the USSR launched Sputnik.

Walter Cronkite used UNIVAC 2 to predict the 1952 election. Unable
to believe the computer report of such a complete Eisenhower sweep,
he failed to report it.

In 1953 IBM announced their first real computer, the 701.  This was
folowed in turn by numerous descendents as well as by numerous
competitors. In 1954 they sold 450 650's mainly on college campuses.
In the same year SAGE linked hundred of radar stations in the U.S.
and Canada in the first large-scale computer network.

The COBOL compiler was developed by Grace Hopper in 1952 and FORTRAN
by Paul Nutt in 1957 and tape drives could write tapes at 200 bpi,
the equivalent of 35 card boxes.

York Lucci and Stein Rokkan wrote their seminal paper on the role
of the traditional library in providing access to data.

The Human Resources Area Files developed at Yale to collect data from
anthropologists and the International Data Library opened its doors at
Berkeley to collect Third World survey data.

The Institute of Social Research flourished at Michigan and the
Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia.  Survey research
and sampling were here to stay...or so we thought.

Almond and Verba completed The Civic Culture, Dahl The New Haven
Study and numerous Health Surveys, The Wisconsin Longitudinal
Study and The American National Election Survey began their long
histories and the Roper Center already held 3200 surveys from 70
countries.


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My child-bearing years ended in the sixties with the birth of my
daughter and by the end of the decade I was employed part-time at
Princeton's Office of Survey Research and Statistical Studies.  I
soon attended my first ICPR meeting and was designated Princeton's OR.

THE 1960's

were the years of The Beatles and the flower children, of birth
control pills, zip codes and of John F. Kennedy and Camelot, of the
continued expansion of the Vietnam War, of space, of the Chinese
Cultural Revolution, of Martin Luther King, Lyndon Johnson's "Great
Society" and the building of the Berlin Wall and of Pearson and
Trudeau as Canadian Prime Ministers and of the adoption of the maple
leaf for the Canadian flag.

By the close of the decade there were 200 million TV's world-wide
with 78 million in the U.S. The first successful human heart
transplant was performed and American Airlines launched their SABER
system for airline reservations.

Second-generation computers such as the IBM 7090 and the CDC 3600
opened the decade.  In 1963 DEC's PDP-8 was a runaway success and IBM
sold its CADET (Can't add doesn't even try) later designated the 1620.

The price-tag on computers was in the multi-millions with the giant
STRETCH, and its competitor the CRAY, costing in the vicinity of $8
million although Data General's Nova with 32 kilobytes of memory had
become available for $8,000.

By the middle of the decade the IBM 360 was produced and the disk
had replaced the drum.  Time-sharing had arrived and 800 bpi tapes
were just beginning to replace 556 bpi.

John Kemeny wrote BASIC and UNIX emerged from MIT's Project MAC
and was ultimately developed at Bell Labs.

This was the era of batch processing; of punched cards and of matrix
printing on green-bar paper but also the time in which ASCII was
developed providing a standard telecommunication protocol and making
it possible for machines from different manufacturers to exchange
data.

All of the major statistical packages as well as many long gone saw
the light of day. David Armour wrote DATA-TEXT at Harvard in
assembly language for the 7094. Norman Nie produced SPSS at Stanford
and Roald Buhler wrote P-STAT at Princeton. BIOMED was developed at
UCLA. Ken Janda wrote NUCROS at Northwestern and Ed Myers wrote a
time-sharing package, IMPRESS, at Dartmouth. SUPPAK was produced at
Illinois and the now ubiquitous SAS was developed by the
agricultural statisticians in North Carolina. Nonetheless most
social scientists were still using the card sorter and the Friden or
Monroe calculators. Simple locally written software packages seldom
went beyond cross-tabulations and chi-square.

ICPR was established by Warren Miller in 1962 as a consortium of
eight institutions; the Zentralarchive was established in Cologne
by Erwin Scheuch and archives were established at Essex,
Amsterdam and Bergen some years later.

ICPR began the conversion of quantitative historical data including
census, election and roll-call data to machine-readable form and
the Louis Harris Data Center was established.

Under the auspices of UNESCO, the International Social Science
Council and the National Science Foundation (NSF) three
conferences on data archives were held between 1963 and 1965.
They addressed archiving aggregate national statistics, comparing
nations and the organization of data banks and archives.

The Council of Social Science Data Archives was funded by NSF in
1967 and archive directors and some senior staff from Michigan,
UCLA, Columbia, Berkeley, Yale, Wisconsin and the Roper Center,
joined their European counterparts in meetings at UCLA, at UNC in
Pittsburgh (my first professional trip and my first flight on a jet
plane) and finally in Wisconsin in 1968.

Local data services were in place at Princeton, Northwestern, at the
Universities of British Columbia and North Carolina as well as at
Wisconsin and Yale. At Princeton the library was already paying the
ICPR membership.

It was the beginning of the Current Population Surveys, the Panel
Study of Income Dynamics, the National Fertility Surveys (later to
become the Surveys of Family Growth), National Longitudinal Studies
of Laborforce Participation (then widely known as the "Parnes
data"), national election surveys in Canada and western Europe, and
the World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators and the heyday
of cross-national research.

A 1/1000 and a 1/10,000 Public Use Sample from the U.S. 1960
decennial census was released to a few selected researchers on
punched cards and later on tape. It contained both household and
person records but no code to link one to the other.

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In the 1970's I became actively involved in the burgeoning data
movement, traveled to Europe at least once each year for a meeting
related to social science data and information, developed Social
Science User Services and the Princeton-Rutgers Census Data Project
both housed at Princeton's computer center.

THE 1970's

saw the first of the "baby boomers" reach maturity, Vietnam
protesters attacking University computer centers and finally the end
of the Vietnam War; Nixon, Watergate and the Pentagon Papers were
followed by new Freedom of Information and Privacy legislation, by
the first non-Italian Pope since 1522 and by the death of Elvis
Presley. Environmental concern groups became more active, crack
cocaine made its first documented appearance and South Africa was
expelled from the United Nations.

Early in the decade Intel built the microprocessor, the 8-inch
floppy diskette was invented. and by 1978 the 5 1/4 inch floppy was
on the market.

The Wang word processing machine was followed by the Atari, the
Tandem, the APPLE I, the Radio Shack Tandey, the Commodore PET and
the APPLE II. The last three of these were instant market successes.
In the first month of sales 10,000 Tandeys were sold.

dBASE, VISICALC and WORD STAR were the bestselling software products.

On the other end of the spectrum the US Department of Defense
established four nodes on the ARPANET and by the end of the decade
there was widespread use of online and timesharing systems. The IBM
370 which supported many of these systems had 10 million operating
instructions as compared to the 650's 5,000.

Online bibliographic services like Dialog, BRS and ORBIT came into their
own.

The U.S. Census released off-the-shelf data products, both aggregate
and sample data, and there was a growing involvement of traditional
libraries in providing data services.

The American Library Association constituted a subcommittee to recommend
rules for cataloging machine-readable data files and AACR2 added Chapter
9 with those recommendations.

ICPSR, which had become a general purpose social science data archive,
started the decade distributing about 28 million card images and
ended it distributing over 438 million card images.  By the end of the
next decade that number had reached 4 billion.

NBER organized a conference in New York on data issues and ICPSR
cooperated with the Bentley Library on a conference on archival
management of machine-readable records.

IASSIST was organized at a meeting in Toronto sponsored by the World
Congress of Sociology and hosted by Mike Aiken. Carolyn Geda was the
first president.

A rash of other new organizations included IFDO, APDU, QUANTUM, GODORT,
the Social Science History Association, the European Political Science
Consortium, the Canada Data Clearinghouse and the Association for
Computing in the Humanities.

IASSIST met in London, Edinburgh, Cocoa Beach, Toronto, Itaska,
Uppsala and Ottawa.

The Danish Data Archive (Dansk) was established in 1973 and the
European archives sponsored meetings on the Study Description.

Introductory training for new data librarians became a mainstay of
IASSIST conferences and a data library workshop was offered at
Wisconsin and a course on machine-readable data was offered by Sue
Dodd at the UNC Library School. The first regular data library
workshop was held at ICPSR, a program maintained to this day, and
the U.S. Census began offering seminars for librarians.

Public use microdata samples from censuses were released on tape by
the U.S., Canada and Papua New Guinea. A growing number of federal
agencies began releasing a wider range of non-census public data
products.

NSF funded the National Conference on Cataloging and Information
Services for Machine-Readable Data Files at Airlie House in
Virginia. The recommendations of that conference led to the
development of a MARC format for these materials. Patrick Bova of
National Opinion Research Center provided catalog facsimile and a
bibliographic citation on the verso of the title page of the
codebook for the General Social Survey which had been initiated in
1972.

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By the 1980's I was working full-time plus and served as president
of IASSIST, APDU, and COPAFS as well as a member of the ICPSR Council.

The 1980's

saw Reagan replace Carter, increased inflation, mounting public
debt, government deregulation, AIDS, the murder of John Lennon, the
Contra scandal and a decline in the value of the dollar. An aura of
the 1920's gave us "yuppies" instead of "flappers" and the return of
both condoms and shoulder pads. In the USSR we saw Gorbachev,
glasnost and perestroika and the Berlin Wall came tumbling down.

Supercomputers and NSFNET changed the face of large-scale computing
and MACS, PC's and clones of small-scale computing.

BITNET and then INTERNET provided electronic mail, listservers and
remote logins to academic users throughout the world.

The newly developed tape cartridge held the equivalent of 8 million
cards or four times that of a 6250 tape and five megabyte hard
drives became available for microcomputers.

IBM finally released a microcomputer and colleges and universities
began to take this technology seriously.

The CD/ROM provided online services with serious competition.
Cuadra began issuing a Directory of Databases at the beginning of
the decade. By the end of the decade 400 databases had become 4465
and the new Directory of Portable Databases contained 409 CD/ROM
products.

Apple launched the Macintosh, the first mouse-driven computer with a
graphic user interface and a 3 1/2" floppy and IBM marketed its PC-AT
based on the 80286 Intel chip. The going price for each of these was
about $4,000.

UNIX workstations with high-resolution graphics rapidly became the
mainstay of scientific and engineering computing and were already
replacing large mainframes as servers for social science data.

Word processing, database management systems and spreadsheet
programs were the most widely-used microcomputer products and for
programmers C++ emerged as the dominant object-oriented language.

Relational, multi-platform database systems like ORACLE, INGRES and
INFORMIX were developed. Traditional statistical packages added data
management capabilities and released new versions for UNIX-based
machines and microcomputers.

Data services in traditional libraries began to come into their own.
The American Library Association published Sue Dodd's "Cataloging
Machine Readable Data Files: An Interpretive Manual." A revised
Chapter 9 renamed MRDF computer files, the US Joint Committee on
Printing explored providing computer materials as part of the
depository library program and the Research Library Group and the
Association of Research Libraries began to address these issues.

The University of Michigan Library sent catalog records for all of
ICPSR's holdings to RLIN and regular updates followed. A special
issue of Library Trends addressed data storage and delivery as did
every library publication.

Population Index became the first bibliographic journal to cite
computer files, SOCIAL FORCES the first major social science journal
to provide guidelines for citing MRDF in their author guidelines, and
the Encyclopedia of Population carried an article on MRDF.

Australia, Sweden and Hungary established data archives and the first
Data Librarians served on the ICPSR Council.

IASSIST met in Washington, Grenoble, Coronado Beach, Philadelphia,
Ottawa, Amsterdam, Santa Monica, Vancouver, DC, and then in
Jerusalem. Robbin, Gavrel and Rowe were succeeded by Brown as
IASSIST president.

More and larger census samples were released by the US, Canada,
Norway, Australia and Israel. Sweden provided an online product
using their basic record files.

New titles including SIPP and SIPP-like studies and the Luxemburg
Income Studies appeared. Additional countries participated in the
International Social Survey Program and the USSR participated in
cooperative survey efforts.

ICPSR celebrated its 25th anniversary and the Blalock report recommended
the major restructuring within ISR which has finally taken place.

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In this current decade a newly rechristened data service at
Princeton had a second brush with death but thanks to an outcry of
both internal and external support finally moved from CIT to
Firestone Library's Social Science Reference Center where business
boomed,especially in providing financial and other economic data.
I prepare for retirement and for more time with my family which now
includes an already retired husband and five grandsons.

The 1990's

Nelson Mandela is freed after 27 years in prison; the Hubble Space
Telescope is launched; Bush and Gorbachev agreed to cut nuclear
arms and chemical weapons and Yeltsin was elected president of
Russia. Iraq invaded Kuwait precipitating the Gulf War. Kim Campbell
became Canada's first female Prime Minister and new leaders take
over in Indonesia and Nigeria. Dental and corneal implants and
titanium knees became commonplace.

By 1994 the U.S. government privatized Internet management and in
1995 Sony demonstrated the flat TV. Major newspapers throughout the
world become web-accessible. Electronic comunication became
commonplace and one educated guess of the number of online users in
April of 1999 approached 164 million.

By the end of the decade Apple makes a comeback with a "decorator"
machine providing new competition to WINDOWS 98.

Electronic communication became almost commonplace throughout the
world. More and more text and numeric data became available online.
as file servers, networks and remote logons became widely available
and almost every desk had a PC or workstation.

Gopher, developed at the University of Minnesota in 1991, is
replaced by the World Wide Web, developed in Switzerland. In 1992
there were 20 web servers, in 1993, 200, in 1996, 100,000 in 1998
3.8 million and 5 million today. Everyone has a web page and some
concern has developed about archiving data of value and about the
whole issue of data quality and data timeliness.

Netscape replaced Mosaic and search tools of numerous varieties
became available until in 1999 1,000 discrete engines have been
identified. As an increasing number of data points become available
for times series analysis Economists became major users of microdata
as well as of macrodata.

The periodicals component of the acquisitions budgets at most
University Libraries increased from roughly 50% to over 75%
leaving less money for monographs. Sales of books to these libraries
by University Presses has dropped by half and the Presses are
publishing more books but fewer scholarly ones.

IASSIST met in Poughkeepsie, Alberta, Madison, Edinburgh, San
Francisco, Quebec, Minneapolis, Odense and New Haven and this week
celebrates its 25th anniversary in Toronto.

Stephenson, Humphrey and Burnhill serve as IASSIST presidents.

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What does the next decade hold?  We can only guess.

We would anticipate more resistance to decennial censuses but more
public use microdata from those censuses which are completed and
larger and more complex data files as computer-aided interviewing
becomes more ubiquitous.

An increase in local service data libraries in service environments
with primary data becoming a routine part of library collections and
data analysis a routine part of education at all levels.

Standard cataloging and citation will become common and more and more
OPACS will have hotlinks to metadata sources.

Image cataloging and image databases will make collections of
pictures, slides, artifacts, etc. increasingly available to students
and scholars and the lines between libraries and computing services
will again become blurry...this time perhaps with more success.

Large memory UNIX workstations with high resolution graphic monitors
will replace PC's and MACS and network connections will become faster,
and more reliable and probably more expensive.

And IASSIST will grow and prosper and we will all live happily ever
after...friends and colleagues to the end