Since the establishment of the Austrian Social Science Data Archive in 2016, members of AUSSDA have taken part in two General assemblies, one Service Providers’ Forum and two CESSDA conferences focused on strengthening and widening the European social science data archive service.

Some explanations to begin with

CESSDA ERIC stands for “Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives - European Research Infrastructure”, is comprised of 15 member states and has the goal of bringing together social science archives across Europe. A focus on three areas guides the work of the consortium: technology, training, and trust. Combined, these elements ensure that CESSDA ERIC members, or “Service Providers”, have the knowledge to become trusted repositories, while implementing state-of-the-art technical features.

AUSSDA is represented in the General assembly and in the Service Providers’ Forum. We are regularly informed of the actions of the CESSDA working groups and benefit from their work in the fields of trust, technical, training, and project management.

The work plans

In order to reach its goals, the CESSDA ERIC team, together with the Service Providers, develops various work plans each year. For 2017, the focus was and is on:

• a CESSDA metadata standard
• further development of the European Language Social Science Thesaurus
• a new technical framework for CESSDA
• a Persistent Identifier Policy to
• teaching modules on research data management
• implementing the Euro Question Bank across all archive holdings
• supporting archives pursuing the Data Seal of Approval

Concerning the 2018 work plans, AUSSDA hopes to take on a bigger role in furthering CESSDA’s goals.

Hear for yourself!

Ron Dekker, the Director of CESSDA, will speak at AUSSDA’s event in November. Join us and find out more about CESSDA ERIC and its vision.