Alison Stroud had an idea. The data processor mentioned it at a brainstorming session in early 2014. “ICPSR should have a disability archive,” she said.
“It was one of many good ideas raised during that discussion,” recalled Amy Mehraban Pienta, Acquisitions Director at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). “Alison was finishing her master’s degree in Public Policy from the University of Michigan and had been immersed in the disability research literature in her coursework and for her Master’s thesis. She noticed that disability studies data were not often archived. The lightbulb went off and she began to pitch her idea around ICPSR. Fortunately, then-ICPSR Director George Alter also heard her idea and encouraged me, as her supervisor, to help her develop the idea into an ICPSR Town Hall project. She did so and received pilot funding to launch a mini-topical archive on the topic in 2014-2015.”