Goals and Work Plan
Overview

The Demographic Data Cooperative will reduce redundancies in effort, provide a formal mechanism for sharing information about data, and allow members to embrace advances in web-based resource discovery and dissemination. This will be a distributed data archive, with human and electronic resources located at all participating organizations. We are capitalizing on technological changes that are transforming data dissemination. The Internet has eliminated the need for local data archiving; physical proximity has become irrelevant, since data at a remote location can be obtained as easily as on-site data. Moreover, new kinds of data access software designed to work with machine-understandable metadata are reducing the need for human intervention in the distribution of data to researchers. These innovations make remote data access feasible.

We anticipate that this data cooperative will lead to several economies of scale including:

• Automation of some aspects of data services through investments in technological innovations, which will free time for data improvement and individual assistance to researchers;
• The provision of a more comprehensive data collection than any one center can provide by pooling our holdings;
• The opportunity to eliminate redundancy and leverage our resources for archival development through synchronized data acquisition;
• Increased efficiency of data support services by the establishment of specializations in areas of strength at each center;
• Improved cost-effectiveness by making our data collections as broadly accessible as possible and by serving demographic researchers not affiliated with a population center.