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
- UKDS: Access to over 6,000 digital data collections of key economic and social data
- ICPSR: find data
- Survey Data Netherlands: national example of browsing survey data from different sources
- GESIS: ZACAT - GESIS Online Study Catalogue
- FSD: How to search for data
- NARCIS: National Academic Research and Collaborations Information System provides access to publications, datasets as well as descriptions of research projects, researchers and research institutes.
- UCI: Resources for locating and analyzing social science data across subfields and geographic regions
- FSD: links to websites of some notable surveys, research programmes and data centres
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
- re3data.org: a global registry of research data repositories that covers research data repositories from different academic disciplines.
- ROAR: Registry of Open Access Repositories
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
- Open Archives Initiative: OAI-PMH protocol with implementation guidelines
- Wikipedia: OAI-PMH and its history
Examples
- EUDAT’s B2FIND discovery service, based on metadata harvested from research data collections (EUDAT data centres and other repositories)
- OpenAIRE’s discovery service
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
- Nesstar: social science specific software to build a social science repository, including tools for preparing data and metadata that conforms with DDI, and data analysis.
- Dataverse: Open source research data repository software
- GESIS: Free software DBKEdit for maintenance and DBKSearch (DBK, Data Catalogue of GESIS Data Archive)
- Colectica: Software for statistical data documentation