The Hamburg IEA DPC is the data processing department of the IEA and has existed in its present form since 1995.

The increasing number of international studies, as well as of countries participating in them, and the ever more complex research designs began to place higher demands on data processing. In order to do justice to the increased responsibilities, an IEA data processing department was created at the end of the eighties and beginning of the nineties.

IEA DPC responsibilities result from three different fields of work. Apart from the traditional duties of data management and data processing within the framework of international IEA studies, tasks related to the planning and organization of studies on a national level are playing an increasingly significant role. A third field of work comprises services for scanner-assisted data collection and data interpretation commissioned by both national and international scientific institutions.