The Latin American Electronic Data Archive (LAEDA) project was launched in October, 2009, under a four year grant from the U.S. Department of Education.s Technological Innovation and Cooperation for Foreign Information Access (TICFIA) grant program. The TICFIA program provides grants to develop innovative techniques or programs that address national teaching and research needs in international education and foreign languages by using technology to access, collect, organize, preserve, and widely disseminate information on world regions and countries other than the United States.

The LAEDA project seeks to collect, preserve, and provide access to data sets relevant to Latin American research, policy analysis, and teaching. The focus of the collection is on electoral data, household surveys, and data relevant to public policy evaluation.

In February, 2010, the LAEDA Working Group met to establish a LAEDA Collection Development Policy and a Data Distribution Policy, as well as to discuss preservation and intellectual property rights issues and the structure of the LAEDA Advisory Board.

LAEDA staff is currently engaged in the following activities:

• Initial collection and processing of electoral data sets
• Development of back end data archive infrastructure and user interface
• Identifying members for a LAEDA Advisory Board
• Establishing a set of data archive policies

If you have comments or suggestions regarding LAEDA, please don't hesitate to contact us.