Data dissemination and analysis since 2004
The NESSTAR server was developed by our partner archive in CESSDA ERIC, the Norwegian Centre for Research Data (NSD). Many archives still have NESSTAR instances that are valued for their integrated analysis tools. In Austria, with an interruption of several years, a social science NESSTAR repository has been running for 16 years: first at the Vienna Institute for Social Science Documentation and Methodology (WISDOM) and later to make the former WISDOM data easily findable in AUSSDA.
We have often referred to them as “old stocks”, but there are many exciting data sets, such as survey data from the Sozialwissenschaftliche Studiengesellschaft (SWS) from 1974 to 2008 and the Mikrozensus der Statistik Austria from 1970 to 2003. While a large part of the data from the SWS is available in our AUSSDA Dataverse, only the documentation of the microcensus is currently online. The corresponding data can be requested by e-mail and will gradually be made directly accessible via Dataverse. All other newly added studies in the Public AUSSDA Dataverse are accessible as well but require approval by our team.
From NESSTAR to Dataverse
The demanding work of migrating the data from NESSTAR to Dataverse was undertaken by various colleagues in the AUSSDA team. Firstly, the metadata had to be adapted to the changed standards of metadata documentation. Then, the uploaded files had to be converted into archive formats and finally the access conditions in Dataverse had to be changed.
Since a large number of metadata entries (565) and a large amount of files (1 654) were involved, the migration to Dataverse was implemented using the pyDataverse tool developed by AUSSDA. For this purpose, we manually extracted the metadata from the NESSTAR server and edited it according to the current CESSDA ERIC metadata standards. The newly edited metadata was imported as CSV files using pyDataverse via the Dataverse API. In the next step, the corresponding documentation and data files were uploaded, and license conditions and access rights were assigned. The final step was the automatic publication of the 565 entries using pyDataverse.
A little farewell
The AUSSDA team looks a little nostalgically at this farewell. In the future, the website "finddata.aussda.at", where the AUSSDA NESSTAR could be found, will link to our dataverse. Discover the "new" data in our AUSSDA Dataverse under data.aussda.at. If you have any questions or comments, you can reach us as always at info@aussda.at.
