News
Major changes to the IRW — new data, new tools, and changes to what the warehouse claims about itself. Smaller day-to-day work (individual table additions, item-text disclosures) is not listed here; see Known Issues for the running record of item-text caveats, and the GitHub repositories for everything else.
This log begins in September 2026, when the page was created. The IRW is older than the log, and changes before then are recorded only in the repositories’ commit history and in the versioned data itself.
2026-09-08 — An MCP server for the IRW
The Python package now ships a local MCP server, so an AI assistant can search the corpus, describe a table, read its processing notes, and fetch bounded slices of data without you pasting anything in by hand. Seven tools, all read-only. Setup instructions are on Using an AI Assistant, alongside the plain-text briefing at /llms.txt for assistants that cannot run a server.
resp_raw is now documented in the core data standard: the column that preserves a response exactly as the source recorded it, when resp had to be coerced to a number.
2026-09-07 — pip install irw
The Python package is on PyPI. Previously it had to be installed from GitHub. One consequence worth knowing: pip install irw gives you the last released version, so a fix that has been merged is not necessarily a fix you have.
2026-09-05 — Item text outgrew one table, and some wording was withdrawn
Item text is now spread across shards (irw_text, irw_text_2) because a single Redivis dataset holds at most 1000 tables. Both the R and Python packages resolve shards for you; if you were querying irw_text directly, you were seeing only part of the collection.
Separately, a rights review removed IRW-hosted item wording for several instruments — including PROMIS, the TAS-20 and the DSES — where the instrument’s own licence bars redistribution, even though the response data remains freely available. The licence on a deposited dataset is not a licence to the instrument inside it. Response data for those tables is untouched; only the wording is gone. R package 1.1.3 released the same day.
2026-09-03 — One version number for the whole corpus
Every response now carries an irw_version, and there is a corpus-wide version manifest behind it. irw_version() / irw_use_version() in R and irw.version() in Python let you read the current version, look up what was current on a given date, and pin an entire analysis to one version. Version numbers are never reused or renumbered.
Also that day: a pilot of per-table landing pages for 25 tables, each with schema.org and Croissant metadata, so individual IRW tables can be found and machine-read from outside the warehouse.
2026-09-02 — R package gains prediction utilities
irw_imv() and irw_predict() give the information-theoretic model comparison example a home in the package rather than in a vignette. redivis moved from Imports to Suggests, so installing irw no longer requires it until you fetch data. irw_simdata()’s 2PL discriminations now have a spread worth simulating — previously they were near-constant. Released as 1.1.0 through 1.1.2.
2026-08-29 — Collections
Related tables are now grouped into named collections, browsable on Browse IRW Collections, filterable in the data explorer, and readable from R with irw_collections() and irw_collection(). Inclusion calls are ours and are worth verifying before you rely on one.