data archive
data archive, data-bankA storage and retrieval facility or service for social scientific data. Data archiving has grown in parallel with the development of secondary analysis as a recognized field of social research. The International Federation of Data Organizations for the Social Sciences (IFDO) was founded as recently as 1977 by four North American and seven European data archives. These archives act as lending libraries for machine-readable information collected by academics and government agencies. In the vast majority of cases, the information in question is derived from social surveys (most data archives are in fact survey archives), although there are now archives which store the taped interviews obtained by oral historians and others. Survey archives are often depositories for official statistics, including censuses, as well as...
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