Abstract
This paper reviews the archival process at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), a repository of digital social science data, and maps ICPSR’s Ingest and Access operations to the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model. The paper also assesses ICPSR’s conformance with the archival responsibilities of “trusted” OAIS repositories, with the proviso that audit criteria for archival certification are still under development. The ICPSR to OAIS mapping exercise has benefits for the larger social science archiving community because it provides an interpretation of the reference model in the quantitative social science environment and points to preservation-related issues that may be salient for other social science archives. Building on the archives’ long tradition of shared norms and cooperation, we may ultimately be able to design a federated system of trusted social science repositories that provides access to the global heritage.
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Notes
In the OAIS model, the authors point out that “long term is long enough to be concerned with the impacts of changing technologies, including support for new media and data formats, or with a changing user community” (Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems 2002, p. 1-1). Margaret Hedstrom observes, “‘Long term’ does not necessarily mean generations or centuries. It may simply mean long enough to be concerned about the obsolescence of technology” (Hedstrom 2002).
Functionally, a PURL is a URL. However, instead of pointing directly to the location of an Internet resource, a PURL points to an intermediate resolution service. The PURL resolution service associates the PURL with the actual URL and returns that URL to the client (OCLC Research, nd).
A universal numeric fingerprint is used to guarantee that a defined subset of data is substantively identical to a comparison subset (The UNF package 2006).
The OAIS mapping activity was possible because of a year-long effort that ICPSR undertook in 2003 to assess its “data pipeline” process—that is, the path of data flow from data ingest, through data processing, to data preservation and dissemination. ICPSR sought to identify ways to streamline the pipeline process, to incorporate standards, and to improve study tracking. To realize those objectives, a process improvement committee at ICPSR charted the existing process and designed a new, “ideal” pipeline process based on current technology. The committee also looked to the outside world and to external initiatives, like the OAIS, for guidance on what was happening in the broader archival community in terms of best practice and emerging standards in the field. An External Review Committee later endorsed the process recommendations.
SPSS, or Statistical Package for the Social Sciences, was developed in 1968 and was the first statistical analysis product to be used extensively by social scientists. It continues to be used widely today, although there are now several statistical analysis packages, including SAS and Stata.
The MADIERA project (Multilingual Access to Data Infrastructures of the European Research Area) was designed to develop an effective infrastructure for the European social science community by providing a common integrated interface to the resources of the majority of the existing 20+ social science data archives in Europe including several newly established archives in the candidate countries.
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Vardigan, M., Whiteman, C. ICPSR meets OAIS: applying the OAIS reference model to the social science archive context. Arch Sci 7, 73–87 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-006-9037-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-006-9037-z