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CESSDA Data Archiving Guide at IASSIST 2022


Categories: GESIS-News

At the IASSIST 2022 conference, Libby Bishop and Yevhen Voronin from GESIS DSS held a workshop on The CESSDA Data Archiving Guide (DAG) – a resource for people who love data. Together with colleagues from EKKE (Dimitra Kondyli) and SND (Ilze Lace), speakers introduced the content of DAG and collected feedback on the way it can be used for teaching and learning.  

The CESSDA DAG is a new resource designed to support the practical needs of data archive and repository staff. In the guide, data professionals can learn what a data archive is, what it does, and why data archives play an important role in the scientific infrastructure. In other words, it is a must-read for newcomers to data archiving. The DAG is available online https://dag.cessda.eu/ and organized into several chapters:

  • Chapter 1: “Data Archives - a Quick Introduction” – provides an overview of the purposes data archives fulfill and their mission, function and ways of operating.
  • Chapter 2: “Policies of Data Archives” – describes the most common policies a social science data archive has in place.
  • Chapter 3: “Pre-ingest: From early contact to data transfer” – focuses on what data archives do to ensure that the incoming data meet the criteria of data collection and quality requirements before the data are accepted in the archive.
  • Chapter 4: “Ingest and Curation” – describes what steps are necessary to guarantee high quality data, documentation material and metadata so that they can be archived and provided to secondary users while ensuring data security and protection against loss and damage.

The DAG focuses on common ground and is a useful tool for professionals new to data archiving or those who are knowledgeable in one domain and now seek to broaden their expertise.

The DAG is a work in progress, with three new chapters coming in 2022: on FAIR data, Replication Services, and DAG Glossary. They will be published by the end of the year on the project’s website.