CESSDA PPP

Preparatory Phase Project for a Major Upgrade of the Council of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA) Research Infrastructure

The project came to a formal end on 30 June 2010. The work will serve as a basis for the construction phase of the new European Research Infrastructure Consortium. The project reports are available and include, for example, a readiness assessment of Eastern European archives seeking to join CESSDA, a report on training needs, technical reports on developing a data portal and a question bank, recommendations for adopting metadata standards and data preservation formats, and a report on requirements for inclusion of qualitative material into the CESSDA research infrastructure.

The CESSDA PPP was an award totalling 2.7 million euros aimed at developing the CESSDA research infrastructure (RI), and was a direct result of  the CESSDA RI being identified by the ESFRI Roadmap exercise as a research network of excellence. The aim of the project was to plan the future development of the CESSDA RI and focus on tackling and resolving a number of strategic, financial and legal issues in order to ensure that European social science and humanities (SSH) researchers have access to, and gain support for, the data resources they require to conduct research of the highest quality, irrespective of the location of either researcher or data within the European Research Area (ERA).

The project consisted of several interlinked yet individually focused work packages, including work on  developing the data portal to allow seamless access to data holdings across Europe, developing common authentication and access middleware tools, developing metadata standards, creating thesauri management tools, extending the coverage of the CESSDA RI, strengthening the CESSDA RI, investigating the potential of grid technologies, and improving data harmonisation tools.

The research was led by Professor Kevin Schürer, Director of the UKDA.