ENGAGE partner STFC had a meeting with DataCite curators from the British Library on 1/06/2012. DataCite ( http://www.datacite.org ) is a not-for-profit organisation that aims to establish easier access to research data on the Internet through persistent identifiers and thus to facilitate results verification and re-purposing for future study, as well as to increase acceptance of research data as citable contributions to the scholarly record. We expressed our interest to DataCite in the ENGAGE context which was welcome; there are opportunities for the adoption of a common model of persistent digital identifiers of the cataloged datasets.
ENGAGE partner STFC also met with the UK Data Archive / ESDS Head of Outreach and Training on 8/06/2012. UK Data Archive ( http://www.data-archive.ac.uk/ ) supports the largest UK archive in social sciences and humanities and ESDS (Economic and Social Data Service, http://www.esds.ac.uk/ ) is an umbrella service for the UK Data Archive records and other information resources targeted at research and education in social science, humanities, and economics. The meeting allowed us to identify a few groups working on the next generation of DDI metadata format for social science micro-data and SDMX format for aggregated data. Another interesting development could be utilising the multi-lingual ELSST thesaurus ( http://elsst.esds.ac.uk/ ) in ENGAGE: we expressed our interest to it with a positive response; the UK Data Archive are working now on a RDF/SKOS version of it and ENGAGE is going to closely follow these developments vis a vis the second release of the ENGAGE infrastructure prototype.
This is a once-a-year opportunity for data archivists to go behind the scenes and learn first hand from specialists at the UK Data Archive.