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The RSS Working Group on Data
preservation and sharing: standards for
documenting data for preservation and
secondary analysis.
Hilary Beedham
The Data Archive, University of Essex
Chair, RSS working group.
RSS. March 2000. HB/The Data Archive.
Overview
 Introduction to the working group
 Work to date
 The Data Documentation Initiative
 Benefits & disadvantages of the DDI/DTD
 Potential developments in the DDI
RSS. March 2000. HB/The Data Archive.
Why establish a working
group?
 Lost statistical source material
 Preserve the context
 An historical record
 Recognition of need for action
RSS. March 2000. HB/The Data Archive.
Terms of Reference
 To promote the preservation and sharing of electronic data both
within the Society, and to the wider data producing community.
 To promote awareness of the need to preserve administrative data
and supporting material from the past.
 To establish a code of best practice and provide appropriate
advisory material to aid those wishing to preserve data.
 To identify barriers to the preservation and sharing of data and to
make recommendations to the Society on how these might be
addressed.
RSS. March 2000. HB/The Data Archive.
Work to date
 Review of existing material
 Annotated bibliographies
 Code of Best Practice
 Document for data producers
RSS. March 2000. HB/The Data Archive.
Initial Review
 The group reviewed a broad and significant
amount of existing material, e.g.
- EC DLM Guidelines
- NTTS
- ICPSR - guidelines for data deposit
- ICPSR - DDI/DTD
- Qualidata material (qualitative material)
RSS. March 2000. HB/The Data Archive.
Review conclusions...
 Interest in preservation is high
 There is a body of existing work
 This tends to have an organisational focus
 There is common ground but no agreed
common standards
 Capitalise on existing expertise
 Apply standards at data creation
 Potentially expensive for data producers
RSS. March 2000. HB/The Data Archive.
Annotated bibliographies
 Sources of information relating to the
preservation and sharing of administrative and
survey statistics
 Sources of information on preservation and
sharing statistics in other disciplines
RSS. March 2000. HB/The Data Archive.
The DDI Initiative
 The Data Documentation Initiative
 A Project to Develop an XML Document Type
Definition for Data Documentation
 Maps to 15 elements of the Dublin Core
 30 other recommended elements for social
science research & data management
 http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/DDI/codebook.html
RSS. March 2000. HB/The Data Archive.
The DTD structure






Description or codebook header
The study description
The data files description
The variable description
Other study related material
Appendix for generic lower-level elements
RSS. March 2000. HB/The Data Archive.
Benefits & disadvantages
 Benefits
- machine & software independence
- data & metadata stored together
- standards make dissemination easy
 Disadvantages
- snowballing demands on DDI team
- limitation on complex data structures
- limited management of routing
RSS. March 2000. HB/The Data Archive.
Developments for the DDI - 1
 version 1 with tag library published March 2000
 public availability of DDI for research institutes
and software houses
 version 2 might include:
- aggregate data
- complex files (hierarchical, time-series)
- relational & object-oriented databases
RSS. March 2000. HB/The Data Archive.
Developments for the DDI - 2
- documenting complex CATI/CAPI survey instruments
- possible creation of style sheets for web browsing or
- a combination of xml & Adobe Acrobat™ presentation
- interactive metadata entry software
- interoperability with o-o databases & other standards
initiatives
RSS. March 2000. HB/The Data Archive.
A practical application of the
DDI
Nesstar & Faster:
XML for data preservation, resource discovery and data
dissemination
RSS. March 2000. HB/The Data Archive.