Data discovery

Archives make sure their data is findable in various ways. Good documentation and metadata are important for powerful metadata harvesting. In this part of the tutorial you can find standards and software for documentation, list of repositories and national starting points for data discovery.

Examples

ELSST

The multilingual thesaurus ELSST (European Languages Social Science Thesaurus) can be used while searching data catalogues.

Documentation

Portals

There are several good starting points for the discovery of repositories.

Examples

OAI-PMH protocol

Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting enables harvesting metadata from a data repository. An implementation of OAI-PMH must support representing metadata in Dublin Core.

Documentation

Examples

DDI Standard

“The Data Documentation Initiative is an international standard for describing surveys, questionnaires, statistical data files, and social sciences study-level information. /…/ DDI fills a need related to the challenge of storing and distributing social science metadata, creating an international standard for the design of codebooks” (Wikipedia, 2016)

Documentation

Training

Software tools for preparing data and metadata

In social sciences research specific software for documenting studies are being used.

Documentation

Examples