SND's search page for research data has a new design and several new features. The aim is to expand and improve services to researchers and other users, to help them to find and order data.
SND currently holds 2,711 searchable studies from various disciplines. Today, more than 1,700 of these studies can be found in SND's catalogue. The catalogue will soon be complemented with the studies located in the database ECDS (Environment Climate Data Sweden). Much of SND's research data can be downloaded direct from the website. Material that is not available for download can be ordered using an online order form. During last year, SND disseminated more than 6,000 data sets to researchers, students and other users.
There are three major changes to the search page that contribute to an improved service for users:
- Filters. Search results can be narrowed down using filters with drop-down lists. Filters include Subject, Kind of data, Unit of analysis, and Study design.
- Map search. Through the map search, it is possible to obtain the geographic location of the studies that have geographic coordinates listed. Currently there are coordinates in GIS data and in the ECDS research database. It is also possible to publish this kind of information for other types of research data, such as survey data and medical studies that are geographically delimited.
- Study presentations. SND's catalogue pages for research studies have been expanded and now include more structured overviews and detailed descriptions of all relevant metadata (for example, National SOM 2014).
SND's web and system developers have worked on the redesign of the search page for quite a while, and their inspiration has come from a variety of sources, including ICPSR, UKDS, DataCite, Ariadne and FSD. The next stage of development is to create a time line search for archaeological data and an advanced search feature. There are also plans to develop a new questions-and-variables-search for SND, in cooperation with CESSDA.