After a successful first 2018 Widening event in Milan in June, the second CESSDA Widening Meeting 2018 was held in Belgrade, Serbia, on 14-15 November 2018.

Since completing the EU funded project CESSDA Strengthening and Widening (CESSDA SaW) in 2017, CESSDA has continued to organise regular events aimed at informing and sharing expertise with new data service providers. These efforts pay off as CESSDA builds up a community of new data service providers that are not an official CESSDA member yet.

The meeting was hosted by the Institute of Economic Sciences (IES) in Belgrade. This gave the floor to Serbia and the country was accepted as a new member by the CESSDA General Assembly in Lausanne on 22 November 2018. A number of procedural steps will follow with Serbia expected to become an official member in 2019.

“The CESSDA Widening Meeting was a great opportunity for us to welcome European archives at our institution in Belgrade,” stated Aleksandra Bradic-Martinovic of the IES. “We have been working closely with CESSDA for the last few years and we are delighted and hopeful that Serbia will become an official member as of 2019. We are at the beginning of a new chapter where we can build up our own Data Center Serbia for Social Sciences and promote our national resources for wider reuse.”

The Widening Meeting addressed building CESSDA-compliant data services, focusing on technologies, tools, standards, available resources, needs, and gaps.

In total 43 participants from 24 different European countries took part in the meeting as well as representatives of two collaborating research infrastructures, OpenAIRE and DARIAH-EU.

The meeting was comprised of presentations and panel discussions. Aleksandra Bradic-Martinovic presented her experience in establishing a national social science data service, the Serbian Data Center. Lars Kaczmirek and Veronika Heider shared their experience from the first year of operations of the newly established Austrian Social Science Data Archive (AUSSDA).

Other topics addressed were the CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide, persistent identifier policies, OpenAIRE Guidelines, the Dataverse repository system, metadata tools, such as multilingual thesaurus ELSST and the upcoming CESSDA Controlled Vocabulary Service.

The meeting was organised by the CESSDA Widening team, made up of several CESSDA Service Providers (CSDA, ADP, DANS, FORS, SND, TARKI) as part of the annual CESSDA Work Plan. Attendees were staff from current and aspiring CESSDA Service Providers as well as Ministry representatives.

More information:

• Presentations are available here.
• Pictures available here.
• Widening of CESSDA and establishing collaborative networks among data organisations, within and beyond CESSDA membership, as well as strengthening and ensuring sustainability of these networks is among CESSDA priorities (see CESSDA Strategy 2018-2022 at www.cessda.eu).
• Past event: Continuation of CESSDA Widening in Italy (20 June 2018); CESSDA Widening Meeting presents the benefits of membership (22 June 2018)
• Data Center Serbia for Social Sciences