The ICPSR Official Representative (OR) meeting powerpoints from 18-20 October, 2007 are now available.Topics include:
- Managing Geographic Data: Formats, Versions, and Legal Issues
- Symposium: "The Present and Future of Federal Funding for Social Science Research"
- Thinking Big: Promoting Relationships That Promote Data
- Institutional Repositories and Data Archives: The Facts, the Fit, the Future
- Tinkering with Teaching: ICPSR Initiatives to Connect Data and Classroom
- Privacy in the Information Age
- The Politics of Political Polling - Social Science Computing and Technology on Campus
- New activities/projects at ICPSR
- Health Data: Comparative Issues
- New Frontiers in Information Retrieval and Resource Discovery
- International Data Issues: An International Perspective on Archiving and Data Sharing

ICPSR is the Inter-university consortium for political and social research,
an institutional membership-based social science data archive based at the University of Michigan.

The EDINA GRADE project deliverables, including a report on Geospatial data sharing behaviour in UKHE, Charlotte Waelde's groundbreaking report on licensing of geospatial databases (this challenged the Ordnance Survey view that their data is covered by copyright rather than simply the EU Database Directive), Pauline Simpson's survey or 'baseline audit' of geospatial data in IRs, and a compendium of derived geospatial data in UKHE.

Draft consultation from the RIN on high-level principles, and who has responsibility for various policies, procedures and sustainability.

There's also an open access version at http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/41214

Findings – The key message is that by visualizing the role of repositories explicitly in the life cycle of the social science research enterprise, the ways that the partnerships work will be clear. These workings can be seen as a sequence of reciprocal information flows between parties to the process, triggers that signal that one party or another has a task to perform, and hand-offs of information from one party to another that take place at crucial moments. This approach envisions both cooperation and specialization.

Author(s): Ann G. Green, Myron P. Gutmann
Journal: OCLC Systems & Services
ISSN: 1065-075X
Year: 2007 Volume: 23 Issue: 1 Page: 35 - 53
DOI: 10.1108/10650750710720757
Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Quoted: The UK Data Archive is celebrating its 40th anniversary with a special reception in the House of Commons, a workshop and open day at the UKDA and a suite of Anniversary web pages.

Abstract “Qualitative data” are the central issue of this article. Qualitative data are a particular category of data within the social sciences, where data have been predominantly of a quantitative nature. Qualitative data could enrich social science research in many ways. The re-use of this particular type of data is however a new challenge for social science data archives. A new methodology has to be developed when dealing with these data, based on a combination of social science methodology and traditional archival descriptions. An additional question discussed in the article is what the best place should be for archiving and disseminating qualitative data: in research (social science) data archives or in the more traditional libraries and archives?

AHDS depositing resources

Guidance on depositing and preparing data, advice for data creators (incl. confidentiality, ethical and legal issues), processing and preservation