UK DATA ARCHIVE

1. UK DATA ARCHIVE Louise Corti, ODAF April 2008

2. UK Data Archive • an internationally-renowned centre of expertise in data acquisition, preservation, dissemination and promotion • curator of the largest collection of digital data in the social sciences and humanities in the UK • provides resource discovery and support for the secondary use of quantitative and qualitative data in research, learning and teaching • a lead partner of the Economic and Social Data Service (ESDS) • provides preservation services for other data organisations • facilitates international data exchange

3. UKDA holdings Data for research and teaching purposes and used in all sectors and for many different disciplines • official agencies - mainly central government • individual academics - research grants • market research agencies • public records/historical sources • links to UK census data • qualitative and quantitative • international statistical time series • access to international data via • links with other data archives worldwide • history data service in-house (AHDS) • 5,000+ datasets in the collection • 250+ new datasets are added each year • 60,000+ datasets distributed worldwide p.a.

4. Preservation • UKDA currently preserve • approximately 4,600 studies • occupying about 650GB but with capacity for more than 3TBytes on main system • 266,000 files, 56,000 directories (average file size 2.6MBytes). • growing by about 100GB per year • more than 40 years of electronic data preservation • have (so far) not lost any data!

5. ESDS structure • ESDS Management • central help desk service; coherent and flexible collections development policy; central registration service; links to other ESRC resources • ESDS Access and Preservation • collections development strategy; ingest activities - including data and documentation processing; metadata creation; data dissemination services; long-term preservation • Specialist data services • ESDS Government • ESDS International • ESDS Longitudinal • ESDS Qualidata • dedicated web sites • data and documentation enhancements • tailored user support • outreach and training

6. Data support services (DSS) • Run ESDS advisory service for researchers • data creation, data management and sharing • Run environmental data support • new kinds of data • Bidding for MRC DSS

7. Finding data • catalogue of holdings –some 4600 collections • limited and basic DDI 2.0 TO Describes study, methods and data collection • records all study related publications (voluntary) • lists variables for SPSS datasets • can download user guide free (pdf)

8. Data sharing and access • registration using Athens including agreement to an End User Licence, fine-grained access control • download service (SPSS, STATA, ASCII, RTF etc) • online data browsing • Nesstar - simple data analysis, visualisation, downloading and subsetting of survey and aggregate data XML • ESDS Qualidata online – exploring qualitative data XML • Beyond 20/20 – tabulating and graphing international macro databanks

9. UKDA R&D • data management – advice & training • consent and confidentiality – advice • access and authentication systems – Shibboleth • Secure data service (bid ) • Data exchange standards & tools – survey and qualitative • Preservation metadata and METS • thesaurus development • Self-archiving FEDORA system • text mining applications for textual data • Web 2.0 & social networking tools – self tagging; feedback; facebook • survey question bank (bid) • E-science – discussions on grid-enabling data

10. What we’d like to do if we had money • more of last slide • data visualisation – numbers and words and beyond NESSTAR • based on open source tools! • intelligent resource discovery – text mining capacity plus linking catalogues in different domains • more ‘harmonised’ data – across series • legacy work to bring collections up to scratch • digitisation of paper/analogue sources