Reuse

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Engagement with designated community

To ensure that data and metadata continue to be understood and used effectively into the future the ADA liaises regularly with the Designated Community – including data infrastructure and methods experts, data owners and custodians, and end users. The ADA works closely with academic colleagues in POLIS: The Centre for Social Policy Research [17] at the ANU which includes experts in research methods, design and statistical practices as well as social science subject matter experts.

The ADA staff are regularly involved in national and international workshops and conferences. And are active members of several industry groups, for example: the DDI Alliance [18], the Dataverse User Community [19], the Australian Consortium for Social and Political Research Inc. (ACSPRI) [20] and the World Association for Public Opinion Research (WAPOR) [21] for data users. The ADA staff also contribute to ANU teaching and training programs.

The ADA access management team interacts regularly with data users via the ticketing system which functions as a request management platform and helpdesk for general enquiries. The ADA actively supports the establishment of new users in the system, and acts as the first contact for queries about data in the collection and general queries about data management and end-of-life solutions for research project data.

Supporting reuse

The ADA publishes all quantitative data files in multiple formats that widely used by the designated community to support reuse:

  • .sav (SPSS)
  • .sas (SAS)
  • .dta (STATA)
  • .csv

The ADA requires a minimum level of DDI metadata and uses controlled vocabularies and other standards to ensure data is findable and reusable. Expected metadata includes details about the project, contributors, data collection and cleaning procedures, sampling and weighting, related publications and external resources, and geospatial information. Depositors are also expected to provide supporting documents where applicable, including the survey instrument, data dictionary, code book, data user guide, and technical report.

The ADA archivists actively assess deposits for reuse and include usability recommendations in their data processing report for the depositor. Recommendations can include requests for additional metadata or documentation. The ADA supports updates and revisions to published data, metadata, and documentation (as detailed in R11 Workflows).

References

[36] Reuse – (https://docs.ada.edu.au/index.php/Reuse)

[17] The Centre for Social Policy Research (POLIS) – (https://csrm.cass.anu.edu.au/)

[19] Dataverse User Community – (https://groups.google.com/g/dataverse-community?pli=1)

[20] Australian Consortium for Social and Political Research Inc. (ACSPRI) – (https://www.acspri.org.au/)

[21] World Association for Public Opinion Research (WAPOR) – (https://wapor.org/)

[18] Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) – (https://ddialliance.org/)