As a new Social Science archivist, although not new to social science, the problem of convincing social scientists to archive their data is a big stumbling block. There seems to be a culture of working alone and not sharing data, this culture really needs to change to make the most of the limited research resources. The archive (ASSDA) can archive a wide variety of research information including notebooks, images, video recordings, observation data as well as the statistical data. I would like to discuss with the social science community and other archivists:
1. The views of social science researchers about sharing their work and working collaboratively.
2. What it takes to convince them to archive their research.
3. What do they want from a social science archive?
I am interested in this too. I have an archive of data I assembled for my PhD and would like to deposit it somewhere so that other people could use it for their own research, and check my findings if they needed to.
It would be good to be able to do meta searches of this sort of archive – like medical meta-analyses, but social science data can be so diverse that this would be hard under traditional database systems. However perhaps it might be possible using semantic web techniques?
I would love to chat or come to your session.
Is this kind of election data relevant to collections held by state and federal government archives? Could it form another level of context that could help in accessing collections of records that have in large part been determined by machinery of government changes that have followed-on from elections?