This organization offers a substantial amount of social science data in machine readable form to its 370 member colleges and universities. Currently, most data is available on 9-track tape, but an increasing amount is available on other media (CD-ROM, tape cartridges, diskettes, and ftp). For economists, an especially useful collection of data is Class V, which contains data funded by the NSF's Economics Division. They plan to put this data up for public access; in the meantime, they will supply copies on media you send them. Other data of possible interest includes the World Bank's World Tables Of Economic And Social Indicators, 1950-1988; the NBER's Macroeconomic Time Series For The United States, United Kingdom, Germany, And France (which has 1.6 million entries in numerous categories including regional data; most data is from the early part of this century, but a substantial amount is from the 19th century; the most recent is from 1968); and United States Microdata Samples Extract File, 1940-1980: Demographics Of Aging (which is an extract of the Censuses of 1960, 1970, and 1980). In addition, there is a substantial amount of more specialized data of likely interest to economists.
In the main gopher menu, you can search their holdings in the directory "Archival Holdings of the ICPSR."
To obtain data from ICPSR, you generally must contact your local representative, assuming that your university or college is a member of the ICPSR. Data is also available to individuals whose institutions are not members of the ICPSR.
http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/
ftp://ftp.icpsr.umich.edu:70/1/
gopher://gopher.icpsr.umich.edu:70/1/
Bill Goffe <bgoffe@whale.st.usm.edu>