Daily Business
This year we would like to express our sincere thanks to those researchers who approached us with questions on data management, data use and data archiving. We were happy to work and discuss topics like anonymisation and the provision, findability and usage of data with many dedicated social scientists. Our digital archive, the AUSSDA Dataverse, is constantly expanding. We were able to further expand and deepen numerous important cooperations, e.g. with the Austrian election study AUTNES, and the Social Survey Austria (SSÖ) team that also implement the modules of the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP). All survey waves (1986, 1993, 2003, 2016 and 2018) are now available in the SSÖ-ISSP-Dataverse. More details can be found in the corresponding anthology. We were also happy to share knowledge with our community at numerous events and workshops.
In 2019, we also started indexing several thousand publications of the social science archive of the Austrian branch of the market research institute GfK. The first studies will soon be available in our AUSSDA Dataverse.
In addition, we have completed major milestones in our organisational development this year. AUSSDA was evaluated twice - once as part of the University Library of Vienna, once as an independent unit; both times with a very positive result. With the submission for the Core Trust Seal, we were able to take an important step towards its obtainment. We are currently waiting for feedback from the evaluators of the Core Trust Seal. We would also like to thank the members of our working group, our International Advisory Board and the ambassadors of the National Advisory Board for their support and valuable contributions.
European Cooperations
As a service provider in the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA ERIC), we were also able to benefit from the expertise of our European partner archives in 2019, e.g. the CESSDA Expert Seminar, as well as provide valuable input at additional meetings of CESSDA-ERIC interest groups. Moreover, participants of the Dataverse Mirror Project further developed our archive software Dataverse.
Within the framework of the projects Social Sciences & Humanities Open Cloud (SSHOC) and EOSC-Pillar, we actively participated in the implementation of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). While AUSSDA mainly contributed to SSHOC in the areas of Communication and the programming of PyDataverse at the end of last year, the deliveries in 2019 focused on EOSC-Pillar project and the coordination, planning and implementation of a large-scale study.
On our behalf
In 2019, we are also pleased to welcome new members to our team. With Sabrina Zehetner, Anita Bodlos, Karin Faktor, Patrick Zieserl, Julia Geistberger (Vienna office), Alexandra Schürz (Linz office) and Lorenz Makula (Graz office), we have brought social science knowledge, librarian accuracy and committed young archivists to our team. We would also like to take this opportunity to thank our former colleagues who broke new ground in 2019.
The productive year 2019 ends with a short break: our offices will be closed until 1 January 2020.
We wish you a Merry Christmas, relaxing holidays and only the best for 2020!
