Background Information and Context
Identifier information
- Re3data Identifier: https://www.re3data.org/repository/r3d100010138
- ROR identifier: https://ror.org/00qtfgg81
- RRID:SCR_014706
- FAIRsharing DOI: 10.25504/FAIRsharing.sN8d9i
Repository type
Specialist repository
The ADA’s focus is Social Science data in its broadest interpretation, includes a wide variety of research data involving humans. The ADA is purely a digital data archive that does not preserve physical objects but will digitize and preserve relevant documents and data of interest.
Overview
The Australian Data Archive (ADA) provides a national service for the collection and preservation of digital research data and to make these data available for secondary analysis by academic researchers and other users. The archive is based in POLIS: the Social Policy Research Centre (formerly the ANU Centre for Social Research and Methods - CSRM) at the Australian National University (ANU). Along with Australian data, ADA is also a repository for studies conducted in other countries, particularly throughout the Asia-Pacific region.
The ADA:
- Has a team of professional data archivists, advised by a panel of leading social scientists, providing both stewardship and outreach services to the Australian community.
- Acquires, documents, preserves, and disseminates data online to a broad range of social science researchers in the university, government, and other sectors.
- Provides the only comprehensive social science data collection in Australia, with a catalogue of data files from over 1500 projects dating back to 1833 through to the present day.
- Holds data from Australian surveys, opinion polls and censuses and includes data from other countries within the Asia Pacific region. The ADA data catalogue includes studies from countries other than Australia including New Zealand, Bangladesh, Cambodia, China and Indonesia.
- Provides specialist services within specific subject areas, including political science, criminology and Indigenous studies, and within specific data types, including quantitative, qualitative, longitudinal, time series and panel data, and historical statistics.
- Belongs to international organisations (such as the International Federation of Data Organizations (IFDO) and the International Association of Social Science Information Service and Technology (IASSIST) and plays a major role in cross-national collaborative projects.
(4) Designated Community
The ADA provides services to a wide variety of public, commercial and academic users in the research, government and other sectors as designated communities. These communities are naturally reflected in the archive’s holdings. The largest group of users in the designated community is the academic cohort, consisting of students and academic researchers.
Specialist services can be provided within specific social science disciplines, including , political science, criminology, Indigenous studies and related disciplines. This extends to specific data types, including quantitative, qualitative, longitudinal, time series and panel data, and historical statistics.
(5) Level of Curation
D. Data-level curation
ADA archivist staff will perform various levels of curation as agreed with the data owner/ data depositor. The level of curation may depend on the type of dataset (quantitative or qualitative) deposited, and its confidentiality (government of longitudinal data), or other factors. In consultation with the data depositor/ data owner, the archivist staff member will make changes to the data ranging from cosmetic changes, such as spelling corrections and label shortening, to aggregation of variable and restricting of variables as required.
Curation at the ADA can also include conversion of submitted materials to new file formats, including the creation of data files with subsets of the originally submitted data. Enhancement of documentation and metadata is also routinely undertaken by the ADA and can include generating original documentation such as data dictionaries.
This level of curation is applied to all deposits to the extent required to assure consistent accessibility and understandability of the data.
(6) Cooperation and outsourcing to third parties, partners and host organisations
The National Computational Infrastructure (NCI)
The NCI provide and house the platforms that the ADA use to deliver its service as well as providing storage locations for the long-term preservation of ADA data. The NCI is also managed by The ANU as seen in Figure 1. with governance provided by the NCI Board, within the limits of the Statutes and Policies of the University. The NCI operates the fastest file systems in the Southern Hemisphere and is the nation’s highly integrated, high performance research computing environment. Further information regarding the NCI Storage Systems can be found at: http://nci.org.au/our-systems/storage-systems.
The NCI maintain VMWare and VM’s which run the ADA Dataverse servers and provide professional support via their helpdesk facility. ADA staff also have access to the NCI managed RDS; providing additional security when working remotely (for example during the Coronavirus pandemic in 2020 and 2021).
The ADA collection is supported at NCI as a registered project, and is supported under the ANU’s merit allocation. The ADA collection is therefore subject to the same mandates as all other NCI project scheme storage agreements as detailed at http://nci.org.au/users/nci-terms-and-conditions-access. The ADA agree to terms and conditions specified by NCI to use their services such as personal security around logins, user behaviour and other areas.
The Australian Consortium for Social & Political Research Inc (ACSPRI)
The ADA have an ‘as required’ contractual arrangement with ACSPRI to install, maintain, and support ADA software including the various ADA Dataverse applications, Metabase and OSTicket task management and tracking application. The support also extends to the recovery of applications in the event of a loss of data.