Social Science Data Services
Finding and Managing Data for Research

Data Services > Data Centers > HMDC

See also: Tutorials and Archiving & Disseminating Your Data.

Harvard-MIT Data Center (HMDC)

The Harvard-MIT Data Center (HMDC) is the main repository of machine-readable social science data for the Harvard and MIT communities, providing:

• access to data holdings from ICPSR, the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, and many other data sources;
• the ability to store data produced by MIT researchers;
• research accounts that provide remote access to software and temporary disk storage space for limited-time research projects; apply using their new account request form;
• access to software for analysis in their public labs; and
• workshops for learning statistical software programs.

MIT affiliates can identify and download data directly using the HMDC Repository (MIT only). An MIT portal to the repository (MIT Dataverse) highlights data sets available to, and produced by, the MIT community.

The repository, compliant with the DDI (the metadata standard for social science data), has features including:

• format conversion
• subset selection generation
• on-line data analysis
• cross searching data from multiple collections

HMDC studies are comprised of micro-level data sets whose analysis requires specialized software. For guidance on obtaining, extracting and analyzing data, see our tutorials or the HMDC Tutorial on Introduction to Data.