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IASSIST/IFDO 2009: Tampere, Finland May 26th-May 29th, 2009

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latest update 2010-07-21

Posters

Thursday, May 28

3:30pm - 5:00pm

Poster Session

  • Location: Tampere Hall

An Integrated System for the Management of a Longitudinal, Intercohort Survey

This poster describes the integrated system used to store, access, and manage the NLSY79, a multimode, intercohort U.S. survey started in 1979 that extends across two generations. CHRR has merged documentation and data files for each cohort and developed a user interface equipped with software that allows users to peruse the content of a given survey, select variables of interest, create extract files, run descriptive reports, and generate control files to read the data. Key features that enhance user access and the utility of the NLS files include: free, public, web-based access to all non confidential data modules via an integrated database that connects data, field instruments, and supporting documentation; codebooks that contain universe specifications and links to the questionnaire as well as to relevant technical guides, substantive reports, and code logic for constructed variables; assignment of multilevel investigator flags and multiple areas of interest; search and extraction software that allows data downloads and tabular reports; tutorials and teaching datasets; cross-round sampling weights; user access to paradata for nonresponse estimation; assessment of data quality for composite variables, indices, and scales; access to geocode data for contextual analyses; a web-based, searchable, annotated bibliography of NLS research with more than 6000 entries.

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Sharing in the Disciplines: Evidence from an Examination of Dissertations

  • Terrence Bennett (The College of New Jersey)
    Shawn W. Nicholson (Digital & Multimedia Center Michigan State University)
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The practice of sharing is inexorably linked to the open data movement. We propose to offer an expanded analysis of our findings from an examination of a sample of dissertations to reveal trends in the creation, use and sharing of data-intensive files. By comparing and contrasting differences between the life sciences and the social sciences, we hope to point up avenues for further research around data services' role in promoting access and for furthering the development of the nascent open data movement. This poster will complement our proposed IASSIST 2009 panel session, "Data Sharing across the Disciplines: An Empirical Study". For this session, we hope to participate in a three-part panel that will explore and explain differences in data sharing among disciplines - with a strong emphasis on practical tips for leveraging the data librarian's role in data sharing.

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Issues in Digitising and Curating Indigenous Research Data

  • Alex Byrne (University of Technology, Sydney)
    Gabrielle Gardiner (University of Technology, Sydney)
    Elizabeth Mulhollann (University of Technology, Sydney)
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Indigenous research data poses many challenges for curators of social sciences datasets including ontological and epistemological issues. Not only are there extremely sensitive considerations relating to confidentiality of data collected from small, often readily identifiable, communities that have suffered major social and cultural dislocation but also key questions concerning the ownership and control of the data. Datasets which might enable new insights, especially when analysed in conjunction with independently obtained data are frequently destroyed to resolve concerns - at tremendous cost to both researcher and researched. This paper draws on research into protocols and standards for digitisation of Indigenous research resources as well as the initiatives in practice to apply the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Protocols for Libraries, Archives and Information Services (compiled under Byrne's leadership in 1994) to develop culturally appropriate modes of curatorial practice. It posits ways of reconciling the divergent requirements of research and Indigenous protocols to enhance the prospects of preserving and sharing Indigenous research data and interrogates means of translating those protocols and standards into metadata frameworks to enable culturally appropriate and sustainable management.

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What's Cooking at the UK Data Archive?

This poster session showcases current work at the UK Data Archive (UKDA) focusing on the revamped Guidance on Managing and Sharing Data - providing both broad and specific advice on archiving and sharing data, from how to interview, data formats, copyright, anonymisation, methodology etc. This data management advice applies to preparing data for other archives as well as the UKDA. The greatest asset of the UKDA is its collection of over 6,000 datasets collected and preserved, with a history stretching back over 40 years. Data stored at the UKDA is processed and preserved to rigorous standards so that it will be available for future generations. Data users are supported by dedicated services providing specialist advice for census, economic, social, environmental and historical data. Online guides, technologies and tools, web pages and training courses provide researchers and the learning communities with in-depth help in finding the right datasets and using them to their full potential. UKDA's self-archiving system will also be showcased, as well as highlighting progress on its new Secure Data Service and Survey Resources Network, replacing the old UK Question Bank.

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The RELU Knowledge Portal - Linking Data and Research Outputs Across Disciplines.

  • Veerle Van den Eynden (UK Data Archive - RELU Data Support Service)
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The RELU knowledge portal brings together archived datasets, publications and other research outputs resulting from research within the Rural Economy and Land Use (RELU) Programme. RELU is an interdisciplinary research programme funded across three UK research councils (Economic and Social Research Council, Natural Environment Research Council and Biotechnological and Biological Sciences Research Council). Thirty teams of social and environmental scientists study the challenges that face rural areas in the United Kingdom through an interdisciplinary approach. Resulting social, economic and agricultural data are archived at the UK Data Archive; environmental data are archived at the Environmental Information Data Centre of the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology. Publications and research outputs are deposited in the ESRC Society Today digital repository. Thanks to the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), metadata of research outputs are harvested and linked with metadata of datasets. The portal allows easy exploration at project level of research outputs and the underpinning data, with direct links to access datasets and outputs online. By combining long-term preservation of data and research outputs at established institutions, with easy online discovery, exploration and access, RELU is creating a long-lasting information resource.

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From Zero to 3.0: Introducing DDI into the Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research

"The Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research (CISER) is in the process of converting the holdings catalog of its data archive to a format fully compliant with the DDI 3.0 standard. The poster will illustrate the approaches, tools and processes to accomplish the transition, along with a display of results."

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Question Banks, Variable Banks, and Data Banks: Discovering and Disseminating Metadata and Data With DDI-Backed Repositories

This session will demonstrate software tools that allow researchers to find and use metadata and data stored in server-based, DDI-backed repositories. Question banks, for example, may provide access to commonly-used series of questions that survey writers can automatically import into questionnaire design tools. Such questions may link to data collected by other researchers that are described in variable banks. Users of repository-based tools can follow these links to discover more about these datasets and to retrieve the data for possible comparison. These repositories can be restricted to individual institutions for internal data management, or they can be universally accessible so data can be discovered and used and worldwide.

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Using FSD Data: Comprehensive Data Services in English

The Finnish Social Science Data Archive disseminates Finnish research data nationally and internationally. Quantitative data archived at the FSD can be of use to social scientists anywhere in the world. This presentation highlights the FSD's comprehensive services to non-Finnish researchers. The data catalogue on our English web site provides study descriptions in English. Approximately 30 per cent of the quantitative data sets (question items and response categories) have already been translated into English, and more are translated on request. Codebooks for translated data are published online. All services, including translations, are free of charge. Youth surveys and data on elections and political attitudes have been the most in demand. URL: https://www.fsd.tuni.fi/en/

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The Node for Secondary Processing: Live Demonstration of a Tool for Secondary Use of Data, Metadata Generation and Support for Research and Educational Purposes

  • Christina Frentzu (Greek Social Data Bank - National Centre for Social Research)
    Chryssa Kappi (Greek Social Data Bank - National Centre for Social Research)
    Dimitra Kondyli (Greek Social Data Bank - National Centre for Social Research)
    Tolis Linardis (Greek Social Data Bank - National Centre for Social Research)
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The Node for the Secondary Processing (NSP) is a dynamic environment with digital content that is composed of sets of micro and macro data, research projects, information on institutions relevant to social research, research personnel, bibliographic references and terminology. This content is organized in Subject Matter Databases. They share common documentation objects under a relational database model supported by specially designed software through which documentation, classification, file import, indexing and searching, as well as on line supplementary documentation to the existing database objects, are possible. The subject matter of each database refers to key fields in social sciences. Studies and data have been collected by researchers at EKKE since 2002 as part of the project: "KOMVOS" (2002-2008). Through supplementary documentation tools available by NSP the content of the databases is continuously updated by specialized individual users and/or social sciences students, as part of their training, thus offering a web facility for secondary processing and analysis of data. The subject matter databases are continuously expanded through partnerships and networking with the wider academic community of the country.

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Web Investigator, Access to the National Longitudinal Surveys

The National Longitudinal Surveys (NLS) are a set of surveys sponsored by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) of the U.S. Department of Labor. These surveys have gathered information at multiple points in time on the labor market experiences and other significant life events of several groups of men and women. Each of the NLS samples consists of several thousand individuals, many of whom have been surveyed over several decades. NLS data are made available to researchers through Web Investigator, which allows users to peruse the data for a cohort, select variables of interest, and extract data files along with the commands needed to read the files into SAS, SPSS, or STATA. Researchers can access Web Investigator using any standard Internet browser. Also available online are programs that enable users to create customized sampling weights that adjust for the complex survey design and for using data from multiple years. The Web Investigator can also host other data sets for access. With supplied documentation basics such as: labels, titles, and meta-documentation, any data set can be migrated into the Web Investigator. http://www.nlsinfo.org/web-investigator

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The Digital Preservation Management Workshop at Five Years: Developing Curriculum for the Community

The Digital Preservation Management Workshop, created at Cornell University and now hosted at ICPSR, is celebrating its fifth anniversary. The workshop uses community standards and practice as a framework to encourage managers responsible for digital content over time to establish/enhance institutional digital preservation programs. Since its inception, the workshop team has presented 13 five-day workshops and 8 two-day workshops to nearly 500 participants representing more than 200 institutions in more than 20 countries on 5 continents. The workshop reaches a broader audience through its online tutorial, winner of the 2004 SAA Preservation Publication Award. This phase of the curriculum project, with continued funding from NEH, will increase the instructor base through train-the-trainer programs, expand the network of host institutions within the U.S and internationally, extend the curriculum through topical workshops, enhance the content through systematic updates, consider the value of the curriculum for continuing and academic education, and pursue an almost open source approach to sharing curriculum. Since 2003, the workshop team has collected information from participants though pre- and post-workshop surveys. This paper will review workshop's approach and objectives, and consider its impacts on individuals, organizations, and the community using the survey results.

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Digital Repositories: Vehicles for Delivering Mobile Data to the Scholarly Community

  • Kamani Perera (Regional Centre for Strategic Studies)
    Dinesh Chandra (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India)
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Digital repositories have become a powerful media of communication as they are delivering their information quickly anywhere, anytime without walls and found to be less expensive and more useful for easy access. They overcome successfully the geographical limitations associated with the traditional printed repositories. The resources in digital repositories can be divided in to those that are originally created in digital format such as e-journals, e-books and on-line databases and those originally non-digital resources such as manuscripts and prints that subsequently digitized. Through digital repositories, researchers can access easily the information they need irrespectively its location. Innovative, high-quality, internationally respected research can be made available via digital repositories. Scholars are knowledge creators and actively contributing their research outcome to the society through digital repositories and at the same time access their scholarly literature. A document on a digital repository can be accessed rapidly via Internet to a large percentage of scholars within the scholarly communities. Digital repository will enhance the author's as well as the user's experience with scholarly communications, providing access to its resources. Digital repository creates a direct link between authors of information resources and scholars seeking information. Digital repositories reduce the printing costs, storage space etc.

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Nesstar - Publish Data on the Web

  • Ørnulf Risnes (Norwegian Social Science Data Services, NSD)
    Atle Alvheim (Norwegian Social Science Data Services, NSD)
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The poster presents new functionality in Nesstar:

  • Multilingual: Metadata can be published simultaneously in a number of languages.
  • Embed: Live tables and graphs from Nesstar can be integrated into any ordinary web page.
  • Aggregate data: Nesstar now has support for aggregation and powerful visualisation of aggregate data.

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SDA at the University of Toronto: New Tools And Old Faves And How They Are Used

The implementation of an SDA server at the University of Toronto revolutionized our jobs, our relationships to our users, and the way we present our data. This poster session will present some of the new capabilities of SDA, as well as look at how users are using the interface.

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Building an Active Qualitive Longitudinal Arhive: The Timescapes Story So Far.

The Timescapes Study is funded for 5 years from February 2007 by the ESRC. We are exploring how personal and family relationships develop and change over time. Our focus is relationships with significant others: parents, grandparents, siblings, children, partners, friends and lovers. The Timescapes archive is designed as a multi media resource, giving equal consideration to textual, audio and visual data. Combining these media allows for enhanced sensory insights into how real lives are lived through time. The archive will also hold research outputs and an extensive array of metadata ('data about data') to enable the personal accounts of participants to be placed in historical, geographical and cultural contexts. During the last six months we have been evaluating Digitool as the archival software and developed an initial metadata specification. The specification is intended to support a diverse range of resource discovering over a number of datasets. The archive is intended to be an active resource for qualitative longitudinal researchers where data is re-used in further research. This paper will reflect on the achievements and results so far, detailing the issues encountered with metadata, workflows, security, encryption and access control.

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Publishing Metadata Through The Life Cycle.

  • Sam Smith (CCSR, University of Manchester)
    Jo Wathan (CCSR, University of Manchester)
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Methods of dissemination and access to metadata can have beneficial side effects. this paper discusses ideas and lessons 18 months on from the initial launch of the ESDS variables pages at www.ccsr.ac.uk/esds/variables. A page per variable per dataset, with cross linking and more.

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Liberating Text and Audio: Extending the Lifecycle of Analogue Data

  • John Southall (ESDS Qualidata, UK Data Archive)
    Lorena Zambrano Barrera (UK Data Archive)
    Dimitris Vonofakos (UK Data Archive)
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One of the core skills developed within ESDS Qualidata has been in converting analogue materials into digital formats. Material has varied from the typed manuscripts to audio recordings on tape. This poster will illustrate how the techniques of digitisation are applied and how this frees the data from its original medium. This new mobility allows the data to be archived and delivered to a much wider audience than was previously possible. At the same time it will highlight appropriate quality standards when working with these media and the benefits of best practice.

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DDA Health - Vision, Coverage, Results and the Need for DDI

  • Bodil Stenvig (Danish Data Archives, DDA Health)
    Heidi Wittendorff Jensen (Danish Data Archives, DDA Health)
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DDA Health collects, preserves and disseminates data, which have primarily been collected by interviews, as part of scientific research within the health domain. DDA is an integrated part of the Danish Data Archives under the Danish State Archives The poster will reflect the vision, coverage and results from DDA Health and the need for a life-cycle data model and tools provided by DDI. DDA Health has the vision of becoming the natural choice in Danish research environments concerning preservation and distribution of Danish health related research data for secondary research purposes. The coverage of DDA Health is very broad. DDA Health collects and distributes research data from: Cross sectional studies, cohort studies, intervention studies, case/control studies, combined studies, studies based on open databases and cross national studies. For the time being DDA Health has collected data from more than 400 studies. Among these studies are very large cohort studies and very complex intervention studies, which are clearly reaching the boundaries in our archiving system. This is one of the reasons why DDA and DDA Health is working on the forefront and participate in developing and implementing the new documentation standard (DDI).

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Exanda - a Flexible On-Line Tabulation System Using DDI 3.0

Exanda is an aggregation system for the on-line generation of tables and diagrams (up to three dimensions) based on quantitative data. The output is available in different formats like web pages, PDF for printing, and Excel, SPSS, and DDI 3.0 for further processing. Furthermore a tool (Adobe Flash client) is in development which supports the flexible exploration of the data in the web browser. Exanda uses the new DDI 3.0 at two different places. First, the studies are described in DDI 3.0, this applies primarily to the information about the variables and to the basic study description. Second, the aggregated data is generated on the fly in DDI 3.0 format (ncube). It is used as an intermediate format in the processing stage on the server. Additionally the DDI 3.0 documents can be downloaded as exchange format. Flexible configuration and scalable architecture enable the adjustment of the system to specific needs. Example features: disclosure control of small cell numbers, dynamic language change of content and user interface as well. On-line demonstration with sample studies will be shown. Exanda heavily uses common open source programs and will be published under a GNU license.

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Harmonization of Data Documentation Between Data Archive And Data Producer Using DDI 3.0

Communication between data producers and data archives is of major importance for preparing correct metadata description for surveys. DDI in its new version 3.0 present whole new world for survey description. One of the important new features in DDI is extensive support for metadata reuse on data description level. One of the major goals of a new DDI is to facilitate reusing metadata and thus eliminate costly redundancies and support explicit comparison within and between studies. Question that we deal with is how much more effort will data archives and data producers need to put into their new study description. At this point one of the major data producing organizations in Slovenia, CJMMK, keeps, internally in organisation, a list of variables that they have used in their surveys. They are described by concepts as understood by researchers. The question is how to use those concepts for Category and Coding schemes in DDI3. What will data producing organisation gain in terms of more efficient analysis of existing data and design of new studies? What will data archive gain in terms of ready made in-depth data documentation? These are the questions that were raised in ADP when we started discussing implementation of DDI3 and we will try to demonstrate the case for it.

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QDDS III: A tool for documenting survey questionnaires for researchers and data archives

  • Anja Zwingenberger (University of Duisburg Essen)
    Max Stempfhuber (GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences)
    Oliver Hopt (GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences)
    Rainer Schnell (University of Duisburg Essen)
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The poster describes a new software system for the documentation of the development process of the questionnaire. Furthermore, it allows searching for formal and structural aspects of questions in social science data archives. During the development of a questionnaire dozens of versions of the instruments are generated and subsequently discarded. Usually, only the final version of the questionnaire is documented. Due to this policy, details of previous versions and the rationale behind the final details in phrasing and layout is lost. The knowledge generated during the revisions can not be used for improving future research. We developed QDDS III as a freely available Java-program. The system allows the electronic documentation of the development of Paper&Pencil, CATI and CAPI questionnaires. The program conforms to the DDI-standard of data archives. Finally, QDDS III allows the search and retrieval of questionnaires and survey meta-data for large survey data archives. Currently about 50 widely used surveys are documented within QDDS III. The program is unique in its ability for searching according to formal characteristics of questions. For example, a data archive repository containing hundreds of surveys can be used to find all those surveys, in which a battery of dichotomous questions is followed by an open question.

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