The National Institute of Standards and Technology's Advanced Technology Program (ATP/NIST) provided funding to establish a data enclave at NORC.  The enclave is a tool that allows the sharing, among a closed community of researchers, datasets that are too sensitive to share broadly.  NORC's activities include:

• Archiving, curating, and indexing the data,
• Providing researchers remote and onsite secure access to ATP data, and
• Statistically protecting confidential information

In addition, NORC will set up and manage an active outreach program to inform the national research community of the data and to foster the use of the data in research leading to conference presentations and journal publications.  NORC also will establish an extensive education program to ensure appropriate use and disclosure of the data, including confidential aspects of the data. 

The Data Enclave leverages some of the most modern technologies, most notably the Microdata Management Toolkit, which facilitates detailed documentation of surveys and related metadata. The toolkit conforms to the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) and Dublin Core Metadata Initiative specifications for metadata documentation and uses XML technology which, among other utilities, limits the risk of data becoming obsolete as standards and file formats evolve.