On 28 January, European infrastructure CESSDA organised a kick-off meeting for their new agenda for 2021–2022. During the event, they held discussions about coming work tasks and introduced a new strategic way of working.
CESSDA (Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives) is a research infrastructure that strives to bring together European data archives and improve international access to social science research data. Their operations rest on four main areas, called “pillars”: Trust (with activities related to certification), Training, Tools, and Widening and Outreach.
CESSDA has previously worked with yearly work plans, where many initiatives have come from members in the infrastructure. They will now, instead, implement two-year roadmaps, and the projects will be coordinated to better align with the vision for the different parts of the operations.
—It will be a more long-sighted strategy, with roadmaps from each of the four pillars. In one respect, it will be more top-down, but members will be holding mutual discussions about how to reach the goals. This is a new and more efficient way of working in CESSDA, which is also more in line with EU’s new Horizon Europe programme, says Iris Alfredsson, Senior Advisor at SND.
Within CESSDA’s four main areas, there are a number of tasks to perform. There is a total of 11 projects to finish in the coming two years. SND leads two of these projects: one in the widening activities (Widening of CESSDA European Coverage), and one in certification (Trust Activities). SND is also involved in three other projects.
SND Appointed Contact for the European Question Bank
CESSDA provides a number of tools and services connected to research data. Among them are the CESSDA Data Catalogue, a guide to data management (Data Management Expert Guide), and a service for controlled vocabularies (CESSDA Vocabulary Service). You can soon add the Euro Question Bank, where you can search survey questions in studies connected to any of the CESSDA members.
It has now been decided that SND will be the contact for content-related matters for the question bank.
—We will be a first point of contact for those who use the question bank. SND will be a form of bridge between the users and the developers behind the technology, and we will be responsible for bug-fixing, for example. We will also make sure that there is adequate training in how to use the tool, and to set up a reference group. Simply put, we will make sure that the questions bank functions and continues to develop.