Since 2015, CESSDA Service Providers work together on innovation projects and now these joint activities start paying off.

CESSDA invests approximately 1.5 million EUR each year in activities which result in tools, services, as well as widening and strengthening activities throughout the consortium.

One of the main achievements, developed over the last three years is the CESSDA Data Catalogue. It will be a trusted platform for researchers wanting to find and reuse social science and humanities research data. The goal is to create a central one-stop-shop for search/discovery of the data available from within the CESSDA community.

"To realise the Data Catalogue, we had to create several back-office products over the past few years” stated Mari Kleemola, leader of CESSDA metadata management work and Development Manager at the Finnish Social Science Data Archive (FSD). "We had to agree on a subset of metadata, build a metadata harvesting service, set up a data access policy. These were necessary steps in ensuring that data can be both findable and accessible from a single place,” Mari Kleemola added.

“It is our ambition to be recognised as a leading European Research Area technical infrastructure. The CESSDA Data Catalogue is our "raison d’être” as a distributed research infrastructure and will bring with it long-awaited and precious services to social science data users,” stated Ron Dekker, Director of CESSDA ERIC.

The CESSDA Technical Working Group has coordinated work on the upcoming data catalogue. "We want the Data Catalogue to be the first interaction point between researchers and CESSDA Service Providers. It needs to support diverse functionality and workflows to fulfil this role,” stated John Shepherdson, Platform Delivery Director at CESSDA ERIC.

The CESSDA Data Catalogue will be launched in April. Find out more about our Technical Framework.