Accessing Data
The CESSDA data archives provide both data and user support to users, mainly researchers, teachers and students. In general, all CESSDA archives are committed to the acquisition and preservation of social science datasets and their dissemination to researchers for secondary analysis. The actual services offered by the individual CESSDA archive will differ, depending on the size of the archive's holdings and user community, the level of its funding, and the definition of its remit.
CESSDA Catalogue
The CESSDA Catalogue provides a seamless multi-lingual interface to datasets from various social science data archives across Europe. Access to study descriptions and oline documentation is free and does not require registration. The Catalogue builds on the work of the EU funded project MADIERA, the DDI (Data Documentation Initiative) specifications, the ELSST thesaurus enabling multilingual functionality, and the Nesstar technology providing functionality for browsing and analysing data. [more...]
Help on Searching Data
The CESSDA Catalogue enables data to be located in several ways. Search instructions provide search tips and detailed information on how the search enginge works and how to get best results. [more...]
Ordering Data
While many datasets are accessible directly via the CESSDA Catalogue, access restrictions may apply to users or usages, or data may need to be ordered from the archive holding the data. The Ordering Data section contains information on how to order data from CESSDA archives. [more...]
Thematic data
These pages are designed to help users discover data on particular themes. Each thematic page identifies data resources to support a particular area of research. [more...]
European Language Social Science Thesaurus (ELSST)
ELSST is a broad-based multilingual thesaurus for the social sciences. Originally based on the HASSET thesarus of the UK Data Archive, ELSST has been developed over the years by the members of CESSDA. Its main aim is to facilitate access to data resources across Europe, independent of domain, resource, language and vocabulary. ELSST is used to aid retrieval in the CESSDA Catalogue. The source version of ELSST is the English thesaurus. The thesaurus is currently translated into eight other languages: Danish, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Norwegian, Spanish and Swedish. Browse the ELSST thesaurus >>