Transcript Smart Qualitative Data: Methods and

UK DATA ARCHIVE
Louise Corti,
ODAF April 2008
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
UKDA holdings
Data for research and teaching purposes
and used in all sectors and for many
different disciplines

collection



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
250+ new datasets are
added each year

60,000+ datasets
distributed worldwide
p.a.
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!
ESDS structure

ESDS Management


ESDS Access and Preservation


central help desk service; coherent and flexible
collections development policy; central registration
service; links to other ESRC resources
collections development strategy; ingest activities including data and documentation processing; metadata
creation; data dissemination services; long-term
preservation
Specialist data services




ESDS
ESDS
ESDS
ESDS
Government
International
Longitudinal
Qualidata
• dedicated web sites
• data and documentation
enhancements
• tailored user support
• outreach and training
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
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)
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
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
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