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ERIC Number: ED430579
Record Type: Non-Journal
Publication Date: 1999-Jun
Pages: 55
Abstractor: N/A
ISBN: ISBN-1-887334-68-8
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: N/A
Preserving the Whole: A Two-Track Approach to Rescuing Social Science Data and Metadata.
Green, Ann; Dionne, JoAnn; Dennis, Martin
Focusing on the experience of the Yale University (Connecticut) social science data preservation project, this document presents a case study of migration as a preservation strategy, exploring options for migrating data stored in a technically obsolete format and their associated documentation stored on paper. The first section provides background and a project description, an overview of the Yale Roper Collection of public opinion research data sets and paper records, and a summary of the literature search. The following nine steps of the data track are described in the second section: identify equipment; copy files from mainframe-based media to local hard disks; examine documentation; define the column binary format; develop standard variable-naming classifications; read in data with SAS (Statistical Analysis System) and SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences); identify migration formats; recode data files with SAS; and create spread ASCII data files without recoding. The next section addresses the documentation track, including software/equipment, TextBridge Pro optical character recognition software, PDF (portable document format) files from Adobe Capture, and HTML and SGML/XML marked-up files. Findings and recommendations are presented in the fourth section, including user evaluation, findings about data/documentation conversion, and recommendations to data producers. A glossary is included, and support documents are appended. Contains 18 references. (AEF)
Council on Library and Information Resources, 1755 Massachusetts Ave., NW, Suite 500, Washington, DC 20036; Tel: 202-939-4750; Web site: http://www.clir.org/diglib ($15).
Publication Type: Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: Council on Library and Information Resources, Washington, DC. Digital Library Federation.
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: N/A