The Decades of My Life

Presented by Judith Rowe at IASSIST's 25th anniversary conference banquet in Toronto on May 20, 1999:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.