Skip to content
MyData Login/Create Account

Structure of the Council

See Also

The members of ICPSR elect a Council of twelve who serve four-year terms without compensation, meeting three times a year; six new Council members are elected every two years. The Council is the executive committee of the members and is authorized to act on behalf of the members to oversee administrative, budgetary, and organizational policies and procedures of ICPSR. The Chairperson of the Council presides at the biennial meetings of Official Representatives and at the Council meetings. The past Council Chairperson continues as an ex-officio non-voting member of Council for one year after his or her term concludes.

Standing Committees of Council

Council has in recent years employed a committee structure to ensure that Council business can be efficiently and thoroughly transacted. The current Council serving until 2010 has five standing committees: Budget and Policy, Collection Development, Membership and Marketing, Preservation and Access, and Training and Instruction. Council has the option of forming a sixth committee focused on a special topic.

Invited Participants

At each Council meeting, ICPSR hosts a visitor from one of ICPSR's national memberships, as well as an appointed representative from the Council of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA). These participants take part in committee meetings and plenary sessions of Council.

Advisory Committees

Through the years, the Council has been composed of leading scholars from many areas of social inquiry as well as data professionals. However, the broadening content of the Archive and the expanding disciplinary relevance of ICPSR require guidance from a large and diverse set of experts in many fields of social science. Therefore, the Council's work is often supplemented by a set of advisory committees, each of which is chaired by a member of the Council. The content of activities and composition of the advisory committees vary across substantive areas and over time. The Chairpersons, however, seek to attain maximum expertise and breadth of concern in appointing members. At various times there have been committees in areas such as census data, American politics, comparative politics, elites, gerontology, law and criminal justice, sociology, history, undergraduate curricular development, international relations, U.S. state politics, computer assistance, and economics. These advisory committees have guided ICPSR in defining areas for possible special project funding, in establishing priorities for processing data in the Archive, in expanding and revising the curriculum of the Summer Program, and in accommodating changes in the computing needs of social scientists.

^ top of page