The Virtual Data Center Micah Altman Associate Director, Harvard-MIT Data Center Harvard University The Virtual Data Center (VDC) provides a complete, open-source, digital library system for the management, dissemination, exchange, and citation of virtual collections of quantitative data. VDC functionality provides everything necessary to maintain and disseminate an individual collection of research studies, including facilities for the storage, archiving, cataloging, translation, and dissemination of each collection. On-line analysis is provided, powered by the R Statistical environment. The system provides extensive support for distributed and federated collections including: location-independent naming of objects, distributed authentication and access control, federated metadata harvesting, remote repository caching, and distributed “virtual” collections of remote objects. http://thedata.org/ Factsheet available at http://thedata.org/uploads/Main/VDCfactsheet.pdf