Like using the web site of the UK Data Archive? Want to find more data archives? Look no further than the CESSDA web site, on which there is a map of European Social Science Data Archives along with links to those archives.
This article from the September 2004 issue of Communications of the ACM (volume 47, number 9) addresses the problem of the commodification of research data. The authors, James Jacobs and Charles Humphrey, discuss the negative consequences of granting ownership rights to data and suggest an alternative model of a technical and human infrastructure that allows…
DSS – How to Use a Codebook is a neat and concise tutorial from the Data and Statistical Services web site of the Social Science Reference Center at Princeton.
Looking for a concise description of the purpose and significance of metadata? The article “The five purposes of metadata” from the July/August 2004 issue of Library Information Update provides a digestable summary of the five purposes of metadata along with discussion of its importance.
Researchers depositing data with the Economic and Social Data Service (ESDS) must fill out a data submission form. It can be accessed directly from a link on the Research Management and Documentation page or directly as a Word document. I have also saved a copy to the DigiComps folder on Collab (CollabProjectsDigicompsExamples). This is a…
A must-read from the ESDS, Research management and documentation is aimed at researchers who plan to deposit their data with the ESDS. The document discusses best practices for creating and depositing quanititative and qualitative data, including discussion of supporting documentation, explanatory material, contextual information and metadata. This discussion was very helpful to me not only…
This record describing the European Social Survey, 2002-2003 is an example from the UK Data Archive. These fields are interesting because there are subfields. See for example how Coverage includes the subfields Country, Spatial Units, Observation Units, and Kind of Data.
The ICPSR web site features data to download with accompanying documentation. To get to that data, however, one first searches the ICPSR catalog of metadata. The record for the CBS News Call Back Poll, January 2004, for example, uses fields such as title, principle investigator, summary, extent of collection, extent of processing, use restrictions, date…
The UW-Madison DPLS online catalog (which is separate from the University Libraries catalog) is an example of a database of searchable metadata. The metadata provides descriptions of the data and how it can be accessed.
The Electronic Data Center at Emory University is an example of elegant coordination between IT and Library staff to provide data support to academic researchers.