International data organizations were founded by national archives to promote cooperation on the multiple archival tasks and to foster a worldwide network of data services for the social sciences. The use of W3 facilities offers new options for a worldwide data service infrastructure. Professional data management for trans-national comparative analysis must be complemented with suitable retrieval systems. Arrangements to secure the quality of data and the common standards for distribution are on the agenda as well as the long-term storage of data. Expertise and solutions in these areas are also offered as support towards those countries whose infrastructure of the data archiving and distribution may be weak or in development.  IFDO has identified the following resources that provide information on data management and/or available services.

List of IFDO Member Archives
IFDO member archives are listed by country along with their website links.  Each website provides a compact overview and offers direct access to the archive online facilities.

Barometers of Public Opinion
Barometers of public opinion are surveys which try to monitor the evolution of public opinion, often focusing on contemporary political issues in the specific geographic area of interest. The first barometer, established in 1973,  is the Eurobarometer covering the European Union member states. Inspired by the Eurobarometer, other continents and regions such as Latin America Asia Africa and the Arab region  have developed their own public opinion barometers. The Global Barometer Surveys (GBS) has been developed as a cooperation between the Latin American, Asian and African barometers, which gives the opportunity to make comparisons between countries on different continents.

CESSDA – Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives

CESSDA provides large scale, integrated and sustainable data services to the social sciences, having evolved from a network of European data service providers into a legal entity and large-scale infrastructure under the auspices of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) Roadmap in June 2013. Since then, CESSDA has been organised as a limited company under Norwegian law. CESSDA is owned and financed by the individual member states’ ministry of research or a delegated institution. Norway is hosting CESSDA, and the main office is located in Bergen.

Its main activities are:

  • coordination of the network of European data service providers and promotion of the results of social sciences;
  • facilitating researcher access to important resources of relevance to the European social science research agenda regardless of the location of either researcher or data;
  • work continuously to include further data sources from Europe and beyond, into the infrastructure;
    provide training within CESSDA and beyond on best practices surrounding operational processes and data management;
  • promote and facilitate wider participation in CESSDA;
  • the development and coordination of standards, protocols and professional best practices pertaining to the preservation and dissemination of data and associated digital objects.

DataCite
DataCite is a not-for-profit organization that aims to establish easier access to research data on the internet as well as increase acceptance of research data as legitimate, citable contributions to scholarly records. The organization also supports data archiving by promoting the verification and re-purposing of data for future study.

DDI – Data Documentation Initiative
The Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) is an effort to create an international metadata standard for describing social science data. The DDI alliance is a self-sustaining membership organization whose members have a voice in the development of the DDI metadata specification.

European Social Survey
The European Social Survey (EES) is an academic social survey that attempts to explain the interaction between Europe’s changing institutions and the attitudes, beliefs, and behavioral patterns of its different population. The ESS were established in 2001 and is a biennial cross-sectional survey, covering 30 countries in Europe.

GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences
The GESIS International Data Resources page provides a historical overview of cross-national comparative survey projects that focuses on population sample surveys.  This overview was originally developed to complement “The SAGE Handbook of  Public Opinion  Research”, edited by Wolfgang Donsbach and Michael W. Traugott. It represents a compilation from survey project web sites, social science data archive information resources and data catalogues, namely from the infrastructure network web resources provided by the Network of Economic and Social Science Infrastructures in Europe (NESSIE) and the International Federation of Data Organizations for the Social Sciences.

IASSIST – International Association for Social Science Information Services & Technology
IASSIST is an international organization for professionals working in and with information technology and data services to support research and teaching in social science. The organization’s main goals are to foster and promote a network of excellence for data service, advance infrastructure in social science, and provide opportunities for collegial exchange of professional practices. Annually, IASSIST holds a conference that focuses on important and current topics within the area of data service and information technology in social science.

ICPSR – Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research
ICPSR is an international consortium based at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI, USA.  ICPSR consists of more than 700 international and national academic institutions and research organizations. The consortium provides leadership and training in data access, curation, and methods of analysis for the social science research community. One of the training opportunities is the well-renowned summer program in Quantitative Methods of Social Science covering areas such as research design, statistics, data analysis and social methodology. ICPSR also houses a data archive containing more than 500,000 social science files and 16 specialized collections of data in different areas.

ISSP – International Social Survey Program
ISSP is a continuing annual program of cross-national collaboration on surveys covering topics critical to social science research. ISSP gives both opportunities to engage in comparative research, perform analyses over time, and conduct country-specific research for over 48 countries conducted over a time period of 30 years that began with the four original participating countries.

LIS – Cross-national Data Center in Luxembourg
LIS is a data and research center focused on cross-national analysis. The main database is the Luxembourg Income Study, which constantly collects data focused on socio-economic outcomes and institutional factors. The study is the largest available database of harmonized micro data covering multiple countries over a time period of 30 years. LIS has been completed with the Luxembourg Wealth Study, focusing upon household wealth in 12 countries.