Talk:UK Data Archive

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The UK Data Archive  is a national centre of expertise in data archiving in the United Kingdom (UK). It houses the largest collection of digital data in the social sciences and humanities in the UK. Located in Colchester, the UK Data Archive is a specialist centre of the University of Essex. It is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the University of Essex.

Scope and Purpose
The mission of the UK Data Archive is to support high quality research, teaching and learning in the social sciences and humanities by acquiring, developing and managing data and related digital resources, and by promoting and disseminating these resources as widely and effectively as possible.

The UK Data Archive provides access to over 5,000 social science data sets including both quantitative data and qualitative data from a wide range of disciplines. Access to the data catalogue, including online documentation such as questionnaires, does not require registration. However, only registered users can download data.

A large part of the UK Data Archive’s data collection consists of publicly funded data, especially large-scale statistical surveys such as the General Household Survey and Labour Force Survey. Another important source of data is the academic community, sponsored by the ESRC and other funding bodies. In this category belong studies such as the British Household Panel Survey and the Millennium Cohort Study. The UK Data Archive also provides access to important international macrodata series (aggregate data) such as those held by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank via its partnership with Mimas (data centre).

The UK Data Archive ensures that the data will be available not just to current researchers but also to future researchers through digital preservation and migration to new storage media as technology evolves.

To promote the use and re-use of its data, the UK Data Archive provides technical support and advice to users on how to access and use the data, and on data management issues. The UK Data Archive also works closely with national and international partners on data-related projects and initiatives.

History
The UK Data Archive was founded in 1967 as the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) Data Bank. The SSRC was the original name of the ESRC. Four years prior to that, in 1963, the SSRC co-funded the Social and Economic Archive Committee (SEAC) which was set up to investigate and propose solutions to the problem of sharing information about social surveys and the data generated by them. SEAC was particularly concerned that poor communication between researchers was leading to survey work being replicated, thus wasting both time and money, and that data were being sold to the United States (USA), and therefore 'lost' to British researchers.

Change of name
Across the years, the UK Data Archive has changed its name several times, reflecting changes to both its role and funders. In 1972 it changed its name from SSRC Data Bank to the Survey Archive when the Government Statistical Service allowed government surveys to be archived with it. The Survey Archive, in its turn, became the SSRC Data Archive in 1982 when it began to archive data resources other than just survey data. When the SSRC changed its name to Economic and Social Research Council in 1984 the Archive changed its name again to the ESRC Data Archive.

In 1996 the Archive began to receive direct funding from JISC in recognition of the support provided by the Archive for teaching and learning, and dropped ESRC from its name to become The Data Archive. Finally, in 2000, in order to reflect both its UK-wide remit and the importance of its role within an international context, the Archive became the UK Data Archive.

Expanding its scope
Over the decades the UK Data Archive has evolved from an organisation hosting a single service and supported by a single grant from the SSRC, to one that offers a wide range of services and activities, funded by a variety of sources.

In the 1980s the Archive began to get involved with a number of large data-oriented projects. Notable amongst these were the BBC Domesday Project and the Rural Areas Database. The trend to participate in projects increased through the 1990s up to the present, in particular with a string of projects funded by the European Commission, most of which have been orientated toward research and development work and the advancement of technical solutions. They include Nesstar, FASTER, and, most recently, the CESSDA-PPP project.

Over the last ten years, in addition to these projects, the UK Data Archive has developed a number of discrete, yet interlinked, services.

Directors
Directors of the UK Data Archive are as follows:

Allen Potter (1967-1970)

Ken Macdonald (1972-1974)

Ivor Crewe (1974-1982)

Howard Newby (1983-1988)

Catherine Hakim (1989-1990)

Denise Lievesley (1991-1997)

Kevin Schürer (2000 to present)

Collaborations
On a national level, the UK Data Archive works closely with its funders, the ESRC and JISC, the Office for National Statistics and other key government data providers. It also has close links with the National Centre for e-Social Science and the National Centre for Research Methods. It has been designated a Place of Deposit for public records for The National Archives.

On an international level, the UK Data Archive is a member of Council of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA) and of the International Association for Social Science Information Service and Technology (IASSIST). It collaborates with them on projects and initiatives to encourage the exchange of data and technology across national boundaries on issues such as data sharing, metadata and social science thesaurus tools.

The UK Data Archive is also the UK national member institution of Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) in the USA as well as the International Federation of Data Organizations (IFDO). It also contributes to the development of the Data Documentation Initiative.

Services
Current services hosted by the UK Data Archive include the following.

Economic and Social Data Service
Economic and Social Data Service (ESDS) is a national data archiving and dissemination service that was founded in January 2003. It is funded jointly by the ESRC and JISC. ESDS is a distributed across a number of institutions: the UK Data Archive, and the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER), both based at the University of Essex; and Mimas and Cathie Marsh Centre for Census and Survey Research (CCSR), both located at the University of Manchester. The UK Data Archive is responsible for different services within the ESDS including its overall direction and management.

History Data Service
The History Data Service was founded in 1992 as the History Data Unit. It was funded initially by the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust and eventually jointly by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and JISC. In 1996, the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) was set up comprising a managing executive and five service providers. The History Data Service, still hosted by the UK Data Archive, became one of these service providers, and thus formally became part of the AHDS, changing its name in the process to the History Data Service. In October 2003 AHDS 'service providers' became 'subject centres' and all the subject centres of the AHDS were renamed, with History Data Service (HDS) becoming AHDS History. AHDS History ceased operation in 2008, but its successor, the History Data Service, continues to be hosted by the UK Data Archive, which retains a commitment to providing curation and preservation services for the historical community.

Census.ac.uk
Launched in 2007, Census.ac.uk provides a one-stop gateway to data and support services for users and researchers from higher education and further education in the UK to access census data from the 1971, 1981, 1991 and 2001 censuses. Census.ac.uk builds on the work of the Census Registration Service (CRS) project (2001-2006), also based at the UK Data Archive, which provided a one-stop access and registration service for the same range of users and data. Census.ac.uk offers additional services, including centralised searching across all census resources, help and support for users, census guides, workshops and online training materials.

Rural Economy and Land Use Programme Data Support Service
The Rural Economy and Land Use Programme Data Support Service (Relu-DSS) provides data support for Relu projects. Relu projects investigate the social, economic, environmental and technological challenges faced by rural areas in the United Kingdom in an interdisciplinary manner, and involve the integration of social, economical, biological, agricultural and environmental science data.

Relu-DSS offers an interdisciplinary data support service, co-ordinated between the UK Data Archive and the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) at Lancaster, with the lead being taken by the UK Data Archive. The UK Data Archive hosts the Relu-DSS information portal which provides advice on data management, data sharing and preservation to Relu grant holders and applicants, and links to third party data sources.

Relu-DSS also provides the UK Data Archive and CEH with sufficient information to enable them to plan for the management, longer-term preservation and re-use of Relu datasets.

Secure Data Service
The Secure Data Service (SDS) is funded by the ESRC and was set up in 2009 to  permit approved members of the research community to access data that were previously considered too sensitive, detailed, confidential or potentially disclosive to be made available under standard licensing and dissemination arrangements. SDS is still in its pilot phase, and will become fully operational in 2010.

Users will have to provide information about their bona fides and their proposed research to become approved researchers. They will also be required to undergo training on how to use the system, and on the principles of statistical control, and on their legal rights and responsibilities. They will then be able to access the data remotely, perform analyses on the data, and work collaboratively with others, all within the confines of a secure server. All data will remain on the secure server, and final publications will only be able to be removed after careful vetting for statistical disclosure issues.

The system is built around Citrix technology.

Survey Resources Network
The Survey Resources Network (SRN) is a service funded by the ESRC that was launched in 2009 to co-ordinate and develop ESRC activities related to survey research methods. The service is managed and co-ordinated from the University of Essex. Network partners include the UK Data Archive, the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER), both of the University of Essex, the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen), the National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM), at the University of Southampton, the Centre for Longitudinal Studies (CLS), the Institute for Education.

The aim of the Network is to provide a coherent and integrated approach to developing skills and knowledge, disseminating research findings and research resources, and promoting best survey practice.

A key component of the Network is the Survey Question Bank (SQB), which aims to build on the services previously available from the ESRC Question Bank based at the University of Surrey. The SQB is managed by the UK Data Archive

UKDA StatServe
UKDA StatServe is a service provided by the UK Data Archive for creating tailor-made figures and tables from the data from the UK Data Archive’s catalogue.

This service produces statistics (including frequency counts and cross tabulations using either single datasets or more complex timeseries) for customers who are not in a position to analyse the underlying data themselves. Customers may request statistics from particular surveys. Alternatively, UKDA Statserve can advise on the most appropriate surveys and variables to use from the UK Data Archive collection.

UKDA-store
Launched in 2008, UKDA-store is a self-archiving system hosted by the UK Data Archive for the storage and sharing of primary research data from the social and behavioural sciences. The initial phase of UKDA-store is aimed at ESRC award holders, who are required to offer data outputs for sharing through ESDS under the terms of their award contract. It is planned in the long term, however, to extend the system to other social scientists who create primary research data and related outputs.

UKDA-store can hold all kinds of digital objects from numeric and textual datasets to technical and research reports. It can also link to other kinds of outputs, such as academic publications. UKDA-store thus complements the ESRC's publications repository, ESRC Society Today which holds primary publications resulting from ESRC funding. UKDA-store will enable research data and publications to be linked although held in a distributed environment.

Researchers who submit digital outputs to UKDA-store will be able to set permissions for individual and group access, so that data can remain private (on embargo), although metadata continue to be searchable. Data that meet the UK Data Archive's acquisition criteria can be formally archived at the UK Data Archive as before.

UK Data Archive, allied organisations
UK Data Archive is an associated member of the Digital Preservation Coalition

National Centre for Research Methods

The National Archives

Office for National Statistics