Door of Perception The CESSDA Portal Break on

Door of Perception - The CESSDA Portal “Break on through (to the Other Side)” IASSIST 2007 Thursday, May 17, 2007, Montreal Session E 2: The CESSDA Experience: a Royal Mountain Road to Success Mari Kleemola Information Services Manager Finnish Social Science Data Archive mari. kleemola@uta. fi

• It is a truth universally acknowledged, that single archives in possession of good data collections, must be in want of a common catalogue.

C'mon Everybody • Overview of the history of the CESSDA website • Description of the renewal process • Challenges faced on the way/things learned • Demonstration of the new CESSDA portal • http: //www. cessda. org/

Imagine – sharing all the world • Spring 1994: the first CESSDA website • The map with links to the archives

Yesterday - history until 2005 • Integrated Data Catalogue IDC in November 1994, after the Grenoble Expert Seminar • Hardly any changes since 1996 • Number of visits declined from 25000 in 2000 to less than 10000 in 2004 • Use of the IDC diminished from 2400 visits in 2000 to only 200 visits in 2004

To be or not to be - 2005 • April 2005: General Assembly, Neuchâtel: decision to form a Planning Group, led by FSD, to prepare suggestions for modifications • August 2005: CESSDA Website Planning Group formed • October 2005: Expert Seminar, Madrid: website session • November 2005: Planning Group decided on the most urgent minor modifications • November 2005: 1 t stage of renewal completed (critical updates only) • December 2005: Planning Group made a detailed proposal to CESSDA GA to renew the site (a. k. a. 2 nd stage of renewal)

That is the question - 2006 • May 2006: General Assembly meeting, Luxembourg: decision to put the renewal process forward, to form an Editorial Board, and to finalise the new common catalogue • September 2006: First prototype of the new site • September 2006: CESSDA Executive meeting, Copenhagen: several decisions to speed up the EB’s work. UKDA to develop the new catalogue.

You Can't Always Get What You Want The work depended on political decisions, e. g. • Replacing IDC with new common catalogue • Which archives/organisations to be included in the map • CESSDA Intranet • Establish an Editorial Board • Resources and timetable • Physical location of the server • Define user groups

Let's Stay Together Source: CESSDA-PPP bid / Building blocks

Breaking through What a feeling • New site 16. 3. 2007

With A Little Help From My Friends • Decentralized distribution of work and responsibilities: – – – NSD retains the www server NSD created the layout UKDA responsible for the data portal server FSD responsible for updating the www content ZA has registered the cessda. org domain Each archive responsible for its own data catalogue

Message in a Bottle • Complex user interface design via email is difficult (or even impossible) • Need to distinguish between functionality (what buttons to click) and design (what we wish to communicate) • More or less voluntary work gets us only so far – Still some unfinished issues (eg. intra, links to other resources, …) due to lack of time etc. – Resources needed: CESSDA is not a legal entity and has no regular centralised budget • Clear political level decisions needed at an early stage • Only clear questions will result in clear answers!

Neverending Story - Challenges • Different cultures (what is seen as public information) • At the moment the portal is mainly in English – what needs to be translated? • An easy-to-use communication channel to facilitate collaboration and to share best practises (Intra) needed • Current data portal might be a bit confusing to the end user – Different archives have different policies about which studies and what information (metadata/data) they publish – and in which language • Long-time policies missing • Many more addressed in the CESSDA PPP bid

Data Portal • A seamless interface to datasets from social science data archives across Europe • Can be viewed in nine languages • The data may be located in several ways: – – search - free text search browse by topic - CESSDA classification browse by keyword - thesaurus assisted browsing browse by data publisher • Most of the datasets freely available for academic use. • Individual data archives have different access conditions -> need to consult the relevant data archive for more information

Free text search • Performed on all areas of the metadata by entering a search term or phrase in the search box • Where the search terms match a concept in ELSST the search will be performed in all languages supported in ELSST • A list of all resources containing the search term(s) and their language equivalents will be displayed • Where the search term has matched a concept in ELSST, related terms will be offered as suggestions to refine or broaden the search • Also offered: the option to narrow the search to one language • The search term can be truncated by using *

Browsing • By topic – CESSDA two-tier topic classification – Specific terms will be offered as suggestions to refine the search – Also offered: the option to narrow the search to one language • By keyword – ELSST terms are displayed in multi-level hierarchies – Only those ELSST terms that will lead to resources being discovered are listed (either directly or through a narrower term) – By selecting a term a free text search will be performed across all areas of the metadata using that term and all its synonyms in all supported languages – Clicking on the "Assigned Keyword Search" displays a list of resources which have had the selected term in any of the supported languages assigned as a controlled vocabulary keyword

The End Thank you!

Planning group members As of November 2005 • • • • ADP (Slovenian Social Science Data Archive): Irena Vipavc Brvar ADPSS (Italian Data Archive for Social Sciences): Carlo Pisano DANS (Data Archiving & Networked Services, Netherlands): Marion Wittenberg DDA (Danish Data Archives): Lone Bredahl FSD (Finnish Social Science Data Archive): FSD web team (contact person Hannele Keckman-Koivuniemi) GSDB (Greek Social Data Bank, National Center for Social Research): Christina Frentzou ISSDA (Irish Social Science Data Archive): James Mc. Bride NSD (Norwegian Social Science Data Services): Bjarne Øymyr RODA (Romanian Social Data Archive): Adrian Dusa SDA (Czech Sociological Data Archive): Yana Leontiyeva SIDOS (Swiss Information and Data Archive Service for the Social Sciences): Christine Breitenstein-Leuba & Fredy Kuhn SSD (Swedish Social Science Data Service): Birger Jerlehag UKDA (UK Data Archive): Lenin Ageer & Ken Miller WISDOM (Wiener Institut für Sozialwissenschaftliche Dokumentation und Methodik): Tomaz Kastrun ZA (Central Archive for Empirical Social Research, University Cologne): Reiner Mauer

Editorial board members • • • Mari Kleemola, FSD Bjarne Øymyr, NSD Hans Jørgen Marker, DDA Pam Miller, UKDA Irena Vipavc Brvar, ADP