CESSDA (Council of European Social Science Data Archives)

CESSDA is an informal alliance of European data archives which was set up in June 1976. Main purpose is the co-operation on the data archiving and corresponding development tasks as well as the unrestricted exchange of data.

Cooperation of the CESSDA archives

CESSDA encourages the development of data processing technologies. Recent development projects of their member archives are available online:

• NESSTAR - Networked European Social Science Tools and Resources
• ILSES - Integrated Library and Survey Data Extraction Service project

Cooperation also includes the support of recently developing founded or growing national data archives in Europe, which are invited to become partner of the CESSDA network. It associates and cooperates also with other international organisations sharing similar objectives.

Contact to the official representatives of CESSDA via e-mail:

• President: Kevin Schürer, UK Data Archive, UK DA, Colchester, Essex
• CESSDA office: Hans Jørgen Marker, Danish Data Archives (DDA), Odense, Denmark

IDC (The Integrated Data Catalogue)

CESSDA offers data for research and teaching in all the fields of social science. The IDC allows access to the data archive holdings of CESSDA member archives and partners from:

• Members: Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden
• Partner: Australia, Israel, USA (ICPSR)

"The CESSDA Integrated Data Catalogue" - by Steve Hassan, Gunnar Sylthe, Repke de Vries; paper presented at IASSIST '96 (MS Word 6.0 document, 1.13Mb)

Search is possible in the study descriptions fields:

• Title: full title of study
• Name: name(s) of the principal investigator(s)
• Content: abstracts describing the studies
• Start/end year: particular time period covered by research
• Geographical focus: at country level

The MADIERA project is currently working towards the implementation of a new and extended version of the IDC.