Reuse

Engagement with their Designated Community

To ensure that data and metadata continue to be understood and used effectively into the future the ADA is closely involved with the Designated Community. The ADA sits in POLIS: The Centre for Social Policy Research which places its emphasis on staff who understand and value strong research methods and design and statistical practices. The ADA staff actively engages with researchers in this school and the wider POLIS. Moreover, the ADA has a presence in national and international workshops and conferences concerned with social science research, as well as archiving and digital data. Staff of the ADA are an active members of the DDI Alliance, the Dataverse User Community (for depositors and archives) and the Australian Consortium for Social and Political Research Inc. (ACSPRI) and the World Association for Public Opinion Research (WAPOR) for data users. ADA staff also regularly provide input to community activities such as the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia’s Decadal Plan for Social Science Research Infrastructure (https://socialsciences.org.au/projects/decadal-plan/). Finally, the Director and Deputy Director engage directly with users as part of ANU and disciplinary teaching and training programs, such as the ACSPRI Summer Program and biannual conferences (https://www.acspri.org.au/conferences).

Data formats

The ADA publishes each quantitative data file in the four formats most widely used by the designated community:

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

Controlled Vocabularies and Ontologies

For better findability the ADA uses controlled vocabulary and set ontologies for certain parts of the metadata of each dataset:

• Keywords: APAIS
• Topic Classification: ANZSRC FoR codes

Metadata Formats

The reusability of the data is also insured by the ADA’s uses the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) standard of metadata documentation, developed by social science data archives in collaboration with the social science community internationally, so that important aspects of a study and associated data can be understood by the community. The use of the standard includes the use of discipline-specific terms and vocabulary, and also includes the provision of links to documents, publications and similar studies to enable greater comprehension of the data.

Changes to Data, Metadata, Documentation - Future proofing reusability

The ADA is committed to stay aligned with the needs of the designated community. It is actively engaged with the community through conferences and committees to stay in touch with changes in technology and requirements. The chosen platform, Dataverse, is used by many other archives and repositories and is frequently updated to serve the needs of the community. Apart from that, the ADA uses active preservation strategies to future proof the data they archive, see Preservation plan for details.