As one of the departments of the Social Sciences Program within the Harvard College Library, and in cooperation with the Harvard-MIT Data Center, Numeric Data Services (NDS) serves the research and instructional needs of the Harvard community through reference services, data collections, and access to data in other locations. Our goal is to help users become proficient in accessing numeric data for their research needs.

Numeric Data Services provides print and electronic data collections in all areas of interest to social scientists; for example, polls and elections results, census data, international trade, and health-related data. The data librarians assist users in locating numeric data from the collections of Littauer Library, Government Documents and Microforms Library, the Harvard Map Collection, the CGIS Libraries, the Harvard-MIT Data Center, the Henry A. Murray research archive, ICPSR, the Roper Center, the U.S. Census Bureau, other libraries at Harvard, and data publishers and archives beyond Harvard.

The data librarians at NDS work closely with the Harvard-MIT Data Center (HMDC) staff to provide data reference and data instruction. HMDC is the principal distributor of quantitative social science data from major international data consortia for Harvard and MIT, and a world leader in research in digital libraries and statistical methodology. HMDC also provides basic statistical instruction and support to faculty and students throughout the Harvard and MIT community. HMDC created and maintains the Virtual Data Center (VDC), the data archive that provides access to the SSP data collection, the ICPSR collection, Roper Center data collection, ROAD data and documentation, and the Murray Archive. For more information about the NDS program, follow the links below: