Sustainability through the liaison with data archive users

Abstract

As a social science data archive, we focus on collecting research data and archiving it. However, there are more responsibilities that come with data archiving: cooperation on international social surveys (ISSP, ESS), supporting secondary data analysis and much more. Significant part of our work is to communicate with students and researchers, to educate them about data management and data analysis. Although the relationship we have is functional and seems sufficient, we tend to ask ourselves: who are the data archive users and what do they expect from us? We decided to employ user-centered design methods and tools to define a typical user of our services and to find out what their motivations for using our data archive are and what specific functions they use and (do not) appreciate, so we would have a better image of their needs. Moreover, we wondered about the role of open science and its impact on the users’ needs and future requirements arising from the open science environment. Obtained information is a point of departure for redesigning archival services to satisfy new demands our users have regarding more data resources, new techniques of scientific work and better interconnection between different platforms.

Five Suggestions Towards User-Centred Data Repositories in the Social Sciences

“…They mainly use data that are easy to understand, and they mainly encounter challenges such as forming efficient search queries, understanding data, or opening and reading datasets. Two studies on the user profiles of social science data repositories showed a remarkably high prevalence of students: 28.6% of users of a Czech repository and 39% of users of a Finnish repository (Kudrnáčová and Trtíková 2020;Late and Kekalainen 2020).…”