What is the UK Data Service? A beginner’s guide David Martin Deputy Director ESRC Research Methods Festival St Catherine’s College, Oxford 9 July 2014

Overview welcome and introduction a brief introduction to the UK Data Service an infrastructure for social science data access range of services and data innovations and developments brief overview of rest of this session – three “sample” data collections

UK Data Service ESRC has invested substantially in social science datasets, seen as an “infrastructure” for social science previous investments included ESRC’s Census Programme, Economic and Social Data Service (ESDS) and Secure Data Service (SDS) in summer 2012, all combined into a new integrated UK Data Service overarching aim: to provide users with seamless and flexible access to data resources to facilitate high- quality social and economic research

UK Data Service place of deposit for data arising from ESRC-funded research an obligation for award holders to offer data for access by other researchers includes ReShare self-deposit facility Census Support provides access to UK census datasets major collections of UK and international survey datasets Secure Lab for sensitive data access training, support and guidance free to users different access conditions apply to different datasets, from source

Innovations and developments… Ongoing data acquisitions Continuous working with national statistical organisations and other key data providers on behalf of the social science research community Innovation projects – enhancing the service Data enhancement projects such as Enhancing and Enriching Historic Census Microdata Integration with ESRC’s new “big data” initiatives such as business and local government data research centres

Questions David Martin