The Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA) invited its partners to the CESSDA Experts Seminar 2019 on Tools and Services at the University of Essex. Participants from across Europe met at the location of AUSSDA's British partners UKDS in Colchester (UK) from 26-27 September. Key topics were access conditions as well as the important role of technical solutions and the automated workflow with data and metadata. 

The CESSDA Experts Seminar is organised by the CESSDA Tools & Service Working Group. In various lectures and discussions, the participants exchanged ideas - this time the focus was on the topics Tools & Services and Access Conditions. Recurring topics were interoperability of copyright licenses, and the opportunities offered by the automation of data and metadata processing. 

Stefan Kasberger introduced AUSSDA's expertise in the development of tools - and in particular data pipelines - with the presentation of pyDataverse. Particularly, the migration of large amounts of data seems to pose challenges for other organisations as well. Regardless of whether the data and metadata are derived from old software systems, and have to be migrated to a new system, or whether legacy data is digitised in paper form, the use of technical solutions and data-centered approaches is indispensable.