My "Bio" for the 2001 ICPSR Award Ceremony

Phil Sidel started out mid-century at the University of Arizona learning some Spanish and thinking of a career in diplomacy or foreign trade, but some success and enjoyment in his statistics course and subsequent survey research jobs moved him in a different direction.

His first real job was in an international organization - International Research Associates, but the overseas work was all handled by the account executives, most of whom had Masters Degrees in Sociology from Columbia where they studied under Paul Lazarsfeld and learned research working at the Bureau of Applied Social Research. Phil ended up supervising coders, grinding out anova's on the desk calculator, and doing field work on a New York Housing Survey. The latter got him a job in the Housing Division of the Census Bureau - preparing for the 1960 Census and learning to program a Univac before the days of FORTRAN.

In 1960 he used his GI bill to go to Columbia for a Masters in Sociology, and study under Lazarsfeld and work at the Bureau of Applied Social Research. Best outcome of that was that he met his wife, Irene, in the BASR machine room (she was the guru of the counter-sorter and other pre-computer card processing machines). When the computer came to Columbia, Phil's Census Bureau training enabled him to be BASR's "programmer."

In a visit to Pittsburgh, Phil met Carl Beck, one of the leaders in the movement to establish an Inter-University Consortium for Political Research. In 1969, Carl was establishing a Social Science Information Center to assist Pitt social scientists in accessing data and using the computer for research. He needed a full-time director for the program. The timing was right, and Phil and Irene moved to beautiful Pittsburgh.

Phil directed the center (which changed names a couple of times) through the 70's and 80's. The political science faculty member who had been Pittsburgh's OR to the ICPR - newly become the ICPSR was happy to hand over the job to Phil. In the 70's it was a big part of Phil's job, and he soon established a new position "Data Archivist" to do a lot of the day-to-day work. The first Data Archivist was a Historian, Reg Baker, who had gotten his technical training at the ICPSR Summer School.

Because, the Data Archivist position was generally a stepping-stone position for bright graduate students, Phil remained the OR or Co-OR until year 2000. But his most active years in that area were during the 1970's. That was when the concept and operations of a data consortium were just developing and there were a lot of growing pains, both at the consortium and at our member institutions.

In the early to mid-seventies, it looked like our membership in the ICPSR would not be cost-effective. Pitt had already dropped its subscription to the Roper Center, deciding that it would be cheaper to simply purchase those specific studies that were ordered. The same approach was being considered for Pitt's ICPSR membership. Pitt seriously considered and made an effort to form a regional federation to lower costs. Jerry and Carolyn and Janet came to Pittsburgh and helped in the planning. That attempt failed - few of the regional schools were willing, even at the lower cost of a federated membership, and Pitt's costs in supplying data and documentation in the diverse formats required by the local schools would have been immense.

Fortunately, by the time Phil and his colleagues learned that the federation would not work, the ICPSR made sufficient strides in its holdings and services, that there was no more questioning of its value. At the same time, Jerry Club had held the membership costs down to what the administration could see as reasonable. Pitt was with ICPSR for the long haul.

Pitt was not unique, but it was one of a small group that put the ICPSR membership and OR services in a unit that spanned more than one department. Like Judith Rowe's unit at Princeton and a few others, Pitt's Center was funded and organized to serve all the social science departments in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Informally, the same services were extended to all the departments and schools doing social science type research throughout the university. Pitt was also different from many of the other schools in that the services of providing access to data and providing assistance in applying statistical packages for analysis were housed in the same small group.

During the 1980's other institutions were moving their ICPSR membership from individual departments to university-wide units - computer-centers and libraries. It was not until the early 1990's that this happened at the University of Pittsburgh. For budgetary reasons, the center Phil directed was moved into the Academic Computing division of Computing and Information Services. There have been reorganizations since then, but Phil and the data archivist, now re-titled to "Electronic Data Services Coordinator," are still providing the same services, though in a much different technological environment. Since George Evonich is now permanent as the Electronic Data Services Coordinator, and will actually replace Phil as "Statistical Packages Coordinator" when Phil retires next April, Phil has resigned his co-OR-ship, and turned it over fully to George.