How are data archived and/or shared?

The Guide is informed by the archiving policy of relevant public bodies concerned with data resources in the UK:

1. The Economic and Social Research Council requires that all datasets are archived as a condition of funding:
‘All award holders are required to offer their computer-readable data for deposit, prepared to a standard which may be used by a third party, within three months of the end of an award. …Time and funds within the award are available for preparation of data for archiving. The final payment of an award will be withheld until data has been deposited in accordance with the requirements. The appropriate Board of Council can agree to alternative deposit arrangements or a waiver of deposit if a convincing case can be made, for example on the grounds of confidentiality.’ See ESRC Data Policy April 2000

2. ESDS (the Economic and Social Data Service) is the organisation responsible for cataloguing datasets deposited at the end of ESRC projects. It issues the following guidelines for researchers:
‘Data should be prepared in such a way to enable the data to be used by a third party, and by the ESDS to manage and create accurate catalogue records. It is strongly recommended that two to three weeks are costed into research applications to prepare and collate materials for deposit.’ See ESDS guidelines for funding applicants

ESRC and ESDS guidelines make it clear that extra time should be factored into a project to ensure datasets are prepared for deposit. Whilst this suggests that the normal expectation would be for researchers to work on the dataset’s archiving needs only at the end of a project, it is also the case that as data-sharing becomes more routinised, researchers may increasingly factor this preparation work into the data generation phase. Hence, there is a need for a detailed consideration of the issues confronting researchers in preparing qualitative data for re-use, both during and after the phase of data collection.
It should be noted that ESDS Qualidata is not an archive as such. It is rather ‘a clearing house and an action unit, its role being to locate and evaluate research data, catalogue it, organize its transfer to suitable archives across the UK, publicize its existence to researchers, and encourage re-use of the collections’ (Corti and Thompson, 2004: 330). Since 2001 it has been part of the UK Data Archive and acquires selected data collections as well as working to facilitate and develop best practice in data deposition and re-use, but it does not act as a storehouse for all data generated from ESRC funded research. In fact, it operates a set of criteria for acquiring datasets, as can be seen from the following, taken from Corti and Blackhouse (2005), setting out Qualidata's acquisition priorities. Whether or not a dataset is accepted depends upon:

• the relative importance or impact of the study e.g. research recognized to have had a major influence in its field and/or representing the working life of a significant researcher,
• data being complementary to existing data holdings,
• the popularity of the study topic (health, criminology, social policy),
• data being based on national samples,
• mixed methods data,
• data that have further analytic potential than the original investigation

It should be borne in mind that established data archives are not the only way to make one’s data available for re-use. It is also becoming increasingly feasible to create a bespoke presentation of one’s data in electronic format, and to enable some – probably restricted – internet access to it. The authors of this Guide have been developing a Ethnographic Hypermedia Environment (EHE) for this purpose over the past few years. The benefits of this strategy is that the author determines how the material is presented, and can include all kinds of multimedia and hypertext resources. Our own work on hypermedia ethnography is described at our project web-pages.

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