This year marks the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the University of Essex. To celebrate, the university is publishing a series of sixty stories to highlight how students and staff at Essex have created global impact over the last six decades.
We’re proud to be featured as one of these stories, highlighting how our work has helped enrich both the university and wider society to improve people’s lives.
Over the years, the wide-reaching research held in our collection has been used many times to influence government policies for the purpose of making life work better for people in communities around the UK and the rest of the world.
In a world where misinformation is rife globally, the UK Data Service can always be relied upon as an institution that values data integrity at its core. Used by academics around the world, it continues to be the beacon of trust for data, supporting researchers with their drive to find solutions to the many pressing and new challenges we face each year.
A long relationship
Our lead partner, the UK Data Archive, has been based at the University of Essex since 1967, when it was founded as the Social Science Research Council Data Bank.
The earliest data catalogues produced by the Archive were printed on paper. Eric Roughley, Deputy Director of the UK Data Archive from 1967 to 1992, remembered the printing of the catalogues as a moment of high ceremony:
“With due ceremony, the Computing Service’s printer was cleaned and prepared, a new ribbon inserted and, in a most stately fashion, a wodge of print-out would be carried over to the Computing Centre, where we gathered around to observe the new catalogue being printed off. The whole exercise was conducted in a manner more like a masonic ritual – the operator even wore white gloves!”
In 2012, the UK Data Archive partnered with the University of Manchester, University College London, the University of Edinburgh and Jisc to deliver the UK Data Service. Today’s data catalogue can now be easily accessed online and represents the largest collection of economic, population and social research data in the UK. Our data collections are also augmented by world-leading training and support functions.
Innovation and the future
While the paper catalogues and punch cards of the 1960s are now long gone, we continue to innovate to improve the services we provide to our users.
Growing demand for data services and the challenge of securely sharing data at scale are testing traditional data management practices. At the same time, there is growing ambition to maximise the value we can derive from data using artificial intelligence and machine learning.
We will approach these challenges with the same pioneering spirit that has defined our work since the earliest days of the UK Data Archive. For nearly sixty years, we have led and shared best practice across the national and international research landscape to shape and deliver active data preservation services. We look forward to many more years of working with the University of Essex and our other partners to deliver the best service possible for our users.