This guide is designed by European experts to help social science researchers make their research data findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. You will be guided by European experts who are - on a daily basis - busy ensuring long-term access to valuable social science datasets, available for discovery and reuse at one of the 17 CESSDA social science data archives.
It is part of CESSDA’s mission to facilitate teaching and learning in the social sciences. CESSDA has a Training Working Group that is responsible for supporting continuous learning and training of its Service Provider staff and the social science user community. The Training Group maintains the information on this training website.
The CESSDA Vocabulary Service is a tool to manage controlled vocabularies, which also provide versioning, language translation and access to all CVs. This tool aims to facilitate an easy and a less error-prone CVs management, and to help researchers to retrieve information from the CESSDA Data Catalogue and the upcoming Social Sciences Multilingual Question Bank and CESSDA Metadata Standard.
The CESSDA SaW Capability Development Model (CESSDA-CDM) is a structured collection of elements that identify and describe the characteristics of effective preservation processes and activities. Building on established frameworks for trustworthy data preservation and the CESSDA community’s prior experiences, the model provides both a starting point for emerging preservation initiatives and a reference tool for established archives that wants to strengthen their services. It is a model that can be used to appraise and/or improve the capability of a service provider to perform and to provide services.
This guide aims to assist interested actors or country teams in developing plans for establishing national data services in the social sciences.
Individual national development plans have been drawn up for ten aspiring CESSDA Service Providers, based on the gap analysis conducted earlier in the project, as well as summaries in the form of media packs.
The European Language Social Science Thesaurus (ELSST) is a broad-based, multilingual thesaurus for the social sciences (coming soon).
Materials from the CESSDA SaW project to support cost-benefit advocacy.
The Resource Directory targets CESSDA partners and less mature CESSDA Service Providers. It aims to give access to existing resources to help in the building of data archive services or to develop new services and features within existing data archive services.The Directory gathers resources which are already available across various institutional websites. Information on relevant documents, training activities, tools, and support services resulting from past and current CESSDA projects and SP activities have been collected, selected, and reviewed specifically for this purpose. The Resource Directory is therefore a curated inventory of these resources.In order to guide the users within the Directory, specific labels, descriptions, and metadata were applied to index and define the resources. The labels and metadata can be used for a more user-friendly search, allowing easy and rapid access to the resources of interest (coming soon).
CESSDA offers a specific service for data archives that are aiming to join CESSDA. This service offers personalised advice and feedback to specific questions from CESSDA Service Providers and partners. The specificity of this service is to provide more active support, direct help, and rapid answers. This service relies on the help of CESSDA experts, active in the 2019 Widening Activities project or to other relevant CESSDA experts.Questions and answers are being documented to assess the needs and gradually close the gaps with new activities and resources. 2019 will serve as a test year for the service, which will subsequently be improved if the service is used and deemed useful. Send your questions to: archive-support@cessda.eu.
Widening workshops have been organised since 2017, at a rate of one or two events per year. Each workshop is located in a CESSDA partner country.The objectives of the workshops are: (1) to provide a meeting platform for CESSDA partners, their ministerial representatives, CESSDA main office, and Service Providers; (2) to deliver training and information on available support and tools to CESSDA partners; (3) to collect and update information on the situations in non-member countries; and (4) to promote widening issues and CESSDA visibility in non-member countries.The Widening Activities project members cooperate with the CESSDA work groups to deliver training and presentations of relevant tools and support services. Here are links to past events webpages, including the presentations given by the speakers: Milan (5-6 June 2018) and Belgrade (14-15 November 2018).