[R] ICPSR data archive to release datasets in R format

[John Fox]

Dear r-help list members,

I thought that many of you might be interested in the following announcement
from the data archive of the Inter-University Consortium for Political and
Social Research (a world-wide organization of nearly 800 universities and
other institutions headquartered at the University of Michigan):

-------------- snip -----------

ICPSR releases new datasets in R format

ICPSR is pleased to announce that most new datasets we release will now be
available in R format. Along with data files readable by software packages
SAS, SPSS and Stata, data can now be downloaded as R datasets with the .rda
extension.

ICPSR has been releasing files in R since the beginning of the year, and
currently has nearly 150 datasets available in the format.

ICPSR Council member John Fox, a contributor to the R Project for
Statistical Computing, and professor of sociology at McMaster University in
Hamilton, Ontario, said: "Since its advent in the 1990s, R has become
standard software for statisticians, and its use has subsequently spread
dramatically to other fields, including the social and behavioral sciences.
The ICPSR data archive is arguably the most important resource of its kind.
It is therefore a very welcome development that data in the ICPSR archive
will soon become much more conveniently accessible to R users."

R files are available from each dataset's download page under the
"Dataset(s)" section. ICPSR will be adding R files for studies that undergo
updates, but is not planning to retrofit the full collection.

2013-03-12

-------------- snip -----------

You'll find further information about the ICPSR data archive and other
Consortium activities at <www.icpsr.umich.edu/>.

Best,
 John

-----------------------------------------------
John Fox
Senator McMaster Professor of Social Statistics
Department of Sociology
McMaster University
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada