The Georgetown Social Science Data Archive is a resource that provides readily accessible high quality 'real world' data to faculty and students for their research and teaching purposes. The mission of the GUSSDA is to collect, preserve, and distribute survey, census, and other research data of interest to the Georgetown community-especially to Sociology, Government, and Economics departments, as well as to public policy, health care, and educational researchers.

CNDLS statistician Dr. Rusan Chen created, and now maintains and expands the data holdings in the Archive, which has dramatically grown in recent years to include data from nine US and five Canadian data centers. The GUSSDA provides access to the following:

• Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) and Special Topic Archives
• Health and Medical Care Archive
• International Archive of Educational Data
• National Archive of Computerized Data on Aging
• National Archive of Criminal Justice Data
• National Archive of Mental Health Data
• MicroCase Data Archive
• Statistical Computing
• and many more.

Based on CD-Rom and on-line technology, the services of GUSSDA include: assisting users to identify data sets of interest; providing the data in the format that the users are familiar with; subsetting or merging the data sets to fit users' purposes; finding appropriate media to store the requested data; and consulting with the users on statistical issues such as sampling, model building, simulation and graphics. The social sciences community at Georgetown University can use GUSSDA's services for preparation of thesis or dissertation, publication, classroom instruction and policy development.

The main components of the GUSSDA are:

• A production center equipped to run standard statistical software, such as SAS and SPSS. Data converting software such as DBCopy is used for converting among different formats.
• A bank of CD-ROMs to store customized datasets.
• A website comprising data file abstracts, users guides, data request form, services and support, and links to other sites.

In addition to GU's membership in the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), an international archive of quantitative data, data sets are primarily acquired from the MicroCase Data Archive and government agencies such as the National Center for Health Statistics, Bureau of the Census, and National Center for Education Statistics. The GUSSDA also serves as a repository site for locally collected data, such as the data sets collected by Psychology or language researchers.

CNDLS supports the Georgetown University Social Sciences Data Archive (GUSSDA) in conjunction with University Information Services.