Recently, to encourage secondary analysis, the federal government has begun to arrange for public policy data to be documented, archived and released to the public. The purpose of this document is to provide government project officers with guidelines for archiving government-sponsored data files. The guidelines represent a model for systematically transferring data from the original data collection contractors to the public domain in a form amenable to secondary analysis. The model has four stages: (1) establishing requirements, policies, and procedures to facilitate data archiving; (2) deciding whether a specific data set will be archived; (3) creating an archived data set; and (4) transferring the data to a consortium which will maintain and disseminate them. (PN)