Preserving Data

CESSDA Webinar - CESSDA Metadata Model Office

Date: 6 May 2020

Webinar: Accompanying the growing importance of research data management, the provision and maintenance of metadata have obtained a key role in contextualizing, understanding, and preserving research data. Acknowledging the importance of metadata in the social sciences, the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA) ERIC started the Metadata Office project in 2019. This webinar introduces the CESSDA Metadata Office (MDO) and its various activities. A special focus of the webinar will be on the CESSDA Metadata Model (CMM).

Material from this webinar (slides and video) is available for download here.

Webinar - CESSDA EuroQuestionBank

Date: 29 November 2019

Webinar: In the first part of the webinar "The CESSDA EuroQuestionBank: Search, find and reuse questionnaire items from social scientific research", we give a brief overview of the CESSDA EuroQuestionBank (EQB) project and present the current User Interface. We demonstrate how the EuroQuestionBank helps researchers to find, compare and download questions, question-related and study-related information. The second half of the webinar might be of particular interest to developers and metadata providers in or outside of the CESSDA community. We present the EQB architecture and the purpose of the components. We also introduce the requirements for metadata providers if they plan to supply their metadata to EQB.

• Slides from the Webinar
• Video from the webinar (downloadable)

Cost-Benefit Advocacy Toolkit

This toolkit is comprised of:

• A User Guide;
• Three Factsheets (Benefits, Costs, and Return on Investment);
• Four Case Studies from Social Science Data Archives (ADP in Slovenia, FSD in Finland, LiDA in Lithuania, and UKDS in the UK);
• Two Worksheets (the Archive Development Canvas, and the Benefits Summary for a Data Archive).

In addition, the toolkit describes and links to a number of pre-existing external tools and relevant studies. There is also a mapping of the other toolkit components onto the Archive Development Canvas.

The toolkit has been developed for its primary audience of staff in existing or proposed national social science archives in Europe. However we expect the toolkit may be of interest to other audiences even if it is not specifically tailored and adapted for them. The major use for the toolkit will be supporting funding and business cases but elements are likely to be relevant in advocacy to other groups or in supporting broader operational tasks.

Creative Commons licensing is intended to allow you to easily re-use locally any material from the factsheets, case studies, or worksheets in the toolkit.

The detailed description of how the toolkit was developed is reported in the D4.9 Cost-Benefit Advocacy Toolkit Deliverable Report. The development of the toolkit was led by Charles Beagrie Ltd, with support from the Slovenian Social Science Data Archive (ADP), the Finnish Social Science Data Archive (FSD), the Lithuanian Social Science Data Archive (LiDA), the University of Tartu in Estonia (UTARTU), and the UK Data Service (UKDS).

If you wish to cite or provide a link to the toolkit as a whole the DOI https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3662487 will resolve to the CESSDA SaW Cost-Benefit Advocacy Toolkit collection, providing an overview of the toolkit and links to all the components. The requested attribution/citation for the toolkit as a whole is:

CESSDA SaW Cost-Benefit Advocacy Toolkit, Charles Beagrie Ltd and CESSDA 2017, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3662487.

Access Policies and Usage Regulations: Licenses

This webinar about licensing and policy looks into why it is important that research data are provided with licenses, dealing with the challenges and benefits of sharing research data, data ownership, reuse and types of licenses.

• slides
• webinar’s handout

CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide (DMEG)

The CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide aims to put social scientists at the heart of making their research data findable, understandable, sustainably accessible and reusable.

CESSDA experts, busy to ensure long-term access to valuable social science datasets, available for discovery and reuse on a daily basis, guide, accompany and inspire users of the CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide in their journey through the research data life cycle.

The OAIS Model

Many data archives follow the Open Archival Information System Model (OAIS) as a conceptual framework. As the model’s structure is generic and does not provide any direct guiding for its implementation, it can be used by various sorts of repositories or data archives. The primary aim of the model is to provide a broad understanding of actions necessary for the long-term preservation and accessibility of data.

Access CESSDA's tutorial on the OAIS model here.

Elements of the Ingest

Data Ingest is one of the key tasks of long-term preservation. In this phase data archives accept (digital) objects for preservation. One important aspect of this process is quality control as the precondition to prepare digital objects for archiving according to the archives’ standards.

Access CESSDA's tutorial on data ingest here.

Elements of the Access and Dissemination Phase

Facilitating the reuse of data is one of the key aspects of the Access and Dissemination phase. Data archives make sure that data and documentation are accessible and findable so that researchers and other users can familiarize with the source.

See CESSDA's tutorial on access and dissemination here.