It’s International Archives Week from 3-9 June, on the theme of ‘designing archives in the 21st century’, looking at how archives can “deliver benefits to citizens, customers, stakeholders and communities”.
Working across borders is vital to those aims, and the UK Data Service is marking the week with a look at how we collaborate with archives and other organisations around the world to exchange knowledge and share best practice.
Funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and known as pioneers in developing best practice in the reuse of data for research, we are frequently asked by overseas universities, government departments and data archives, to share knowledge, expertise and training across the UK and internationally.
International cooperation
In the last year, our handbook, Managing and Sharing Research Data, has been published in China, allowing colleagues there to learn from our years of experience in the field – and it is now being translated into Japanese as well, extending its reach further.
International visitors
In the past few years, the UK Data Service has welcomed visitors from as far afield as South Africa, China, the United States and Korea. In July 2017, for example, a group of professors from China visited to learn about our programmes to support big data and social science research. The previous year, a visit from Cape Town-based DataFirst cemented a collaboration investigating the challenges of curating and providing access for the social scientists to ‘big’ and complex data – household energy data in particular.
Global knowledge exchange
Our staff have travelled to Belarus, Australia, Canada, Romania and elsewhere to share best practice and often to train colleagues around the globe in research data management and data sharing skills. Last year, for example, following an inquiry by the United Nations, Veerle Van Den Eynden and Louise Corti visited Kyrgyzstan to provide training on sharing research data, gave advice on anonymisation and investigated the possibility of Kyrgyzstan using the UK Data Service as a place of deposit, as it has no fully fledged data repository of its own.
The UK Data Service’s Director, Matthew Woollard, was also recently chosen by the University of Vienna as one of two independent evaluators of the new Austrian Social Science Data Archive.
European partners
We work closely with partners across Europe, including SERISS (Synergies for Europe’s Research Infrastructures in the Social Sciences), a project that aims to provide socio-economic evidence to help countries across Europe tackle societal challenges. In 2018, we opened a new secure data access point in the UK Data Service Safe Room at the University of Essex to allow remote access to French secure data from the UK – part of our involvement in the International Data Access Network (IDAN).
This month, we announced our involvement in the FAIRsFAIR project, a new initiative to develop an overall knowledge infrastructure for academic quality data management based on FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) principles. FAIRsFAIR involves 22 partners in eight EU member states and runs until 2022. Our lead partner, the UK Data Archive, has long been a key contributor to the formation of the network of European Social Science Data Archives, actually dating back to the 1970s. Instrumental in helping it expand and grow, in June 2017, the network became a legal Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA) to deliver large-scale research infrastructure.
Matthew Woollard, Director of the UK Data Service, said: “Our ongoing work, in partnership with other CESSDA archives, helps to ensure UK researchers continue to benefit from the CESSDA data catalogue, making data findable and accessible from other social science data archives across Europe.”
“We have been working in recent years to make sure that – whatever happens to Britain’s position in the EU – our relationship with CESSDA continues in much the same way as it has until now. We look forward to many years of fruitful international cooperation in the future.”
The unique blend of knowledge, expertise and technology across the UK Data Service ensures continued innovations that are helping to transform research and data management across the world.
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