George Alter appointed Director, ICPSR

Historian George Alter will direct the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), part of the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research (ISR). ISR Director James Jackson says: "George has the strong and unanimous support of the ICPSR Council and the ISR leadership. Personally, I am delighted to be able to continue the strong working relationship George and I have developed over the past two years that he has served as ICPSR’s Acting Director." Alter's five-year term will begin September 2011. He replaces Myron Gutmann, who left ICPSR in 2009 to lead the NSF’s Social, Behavioral and Economics Directorate. ICPSR is the world’s largest archive of digital social science data, with nearly 8,000 data collections currently archived.