By robin | March 22, 2007
The Council of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA) redesigned web site is now online at [http://]{.166431011-20032007}www.cessda.org. In addition to the new layout, the site has several new features including the CESSDA Data Portal which allows easy access to the catalogues of member organisations. Other pages provide a central news forum about CESSDA activities, links to official documents, contact details and other relevant information. The site’s content will continue to be developed and will include a members’ section.
CESSDA also has a new email address: cessda@cessda.org.
The CESSDA Data Portal provides a seamless interface to datasets from social science data archives across Europe. The data may be located in several ways, for example by searching or browsing by topic, keyword or data publisher. The data portal may be searched and viewed in any one of nine languages.
Most of the datasets are freely available for academic use. However the individual data archives have different access conditions for their materials. Consult the relevant data archive for more information about these access conditions and possible charges.
The CESSDA Data Portal builds on the work of the EU-funded project Multilingual Access to Data Infrastructures of the European Research Area (MADIERA). The project was based on the DDI (Data Documentation Initiative) specifications for documenting datasets, the European Language Social Science Thesaurus (ELSST) enabling multilingual functionality, and the Nesstar technology providing functionality for browsing and analysing data.
- as announced by Sharon Jack, UK Data Archive, on ESDS-News email list.