NSF CI Compass invites you to attend our next installment in our webinar series, "Lessons from ICPSR's Research Data Ecosystem on Creating FAIR data," featuring Margaret Levenstein, director of ICPSR (Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research).
This webinar will take place on Thursday, December 18, 2025, at 2 p.m. ET / 1 p.m. CT / Noon MT / 11 a.m. PT.
Abstract:
The Research Data Ecosystem (RDE) is modernizing ICPSR's data model and software platform to provide sustainability to its 63-year-old data archive, the largest social science data archive in the world. The presentation will discuss the specific tools that RDE offers, including TurboCurator, the Researcher Passport, and Explore Data. These tools are made interoperable through its schema and metadata framework that we call the Research Data Description Framework. A key element of the new schema is interoperable metadata that leverages community standards for machine-actionable controlled vocabularies. RDE uses Artificial Intelligence to enhance metadata for improved discoverability and analytics, reducing the burden of data sharing while increasing its impact.
Bio:
Margaret Levenstein is ICPSR Director, Professor in the School of Information, Research Professor in the Institute for Social Research and Adjunct Professor of Business Economics, University of Michigan. She is Principal Investigator of the NSF infrastructure project, Research Data Ecosystem and Co-Director of the Michigan Federal Statistical Research Data Center. She serves on boards of Social Science Research Council; World Data System; Data Documentation Initiative (DDI); National Internet Observatory; NOAA’s Data Archiving and Access Requirements Working Group (DAARWG); Criminal Justice Administrative Records System; and Wealth and Mobility Study. She received her PhD from Yale University and BA from Barnard College, Columbia University. She is a fellow of the National Association for the Advancement of Science. She is author of Accounting for Growth: Information Systems and the Creation of the Large Corporation. Formerly president of the Business History Conference, she is the author of numerous historical and contemporary studies of competition and of innovation as well as the production, dissemination, and confidentiality protection of data for social and economic measurement.
