This proposal would create a Web presence for the Spencer Foundation?s New Civics Initiative to serve its mission of expanding understanding of civics education and its relationship to civic action. To support these goals, The New Civics Data Registry (NCDR) will provide infrastructure for researchers to deposit and find high-quality datasets that can be used to study civic education. As a multi-disciplinary research area with data being created across education, political science, developmental sciences and other disciplines, there is an ongoing need for a centralized repository. The New Civics Data Registry will encourage syntheses and facilitate secondary analyses of existing research by the academic research community and others.

The core components of this five year project include 1) A dedicated web page for New Civics datasets; 2) Consultation with an expert advisory committee who will assist in identifying quality studies and datasets; 3) Professional archival, curation and preservation of New Civics data; 4) Consultation and resources to foster best practices in data management; 5) Outreach and data training to encourage discovery and analysis of datasets in the collection across a variety of academic disciplines.