The initial idea of creating a digital archive of qualitative sociological data was born in 2005 in the academic community of the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, but it was only with the support of the National Programme for the Development of the Humanities that the idea could be fully realized. Between 2013 and 2021, the first version of the Archive’s infrastructure was in use, and the principles of developing and providing access to the resources were worked out; also, a community of users was established. The next stage began in 2018, when IFiS PAN took part in the project “Domain Repositories of Open Research Data”, funded by the European Union (project leader: the University of Warsaw, implementation years: 2018-2021). The new infrastructure on which the Archive runs was established then.