Utilizing External Partnerships in Data Archiving

In the past several years, the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, the world’s oldest archive of social science data and the largest specializing in public opinion data, has increasingly cultivated partnerships and collaborations with other institutions. Our primary collaboration has been with Digital Divide Data (DDD), a company based in India, Cambodia, Laos, and Kenya that provides youth development through education and employment programs to underserved communities. DDD provides students with paid positions that give them the opportunity to learn how to interpret and clean survey data, skills which they then use in their educational and career pursuits. Through joint efforts with DDD, Roper has been able to target the conversion of over 600 of our historical ASCII datasets to modern formats as well as processing of over 100,000 questions from toplines incoming daily for entry into our question-level iPoll database. This presentation will provide an overview of our ASCII conversion and question-level curation projects, DDD and their mission, our training and review processes, and potential future projects.