Recent developments in archiving social research

Recent developments in archiving have built on a 50 year foundation of sharing social survey data and are enabling the take-up of data curation practices on a wider scale. Advances in data archiving have been driven by the quest for comparable and harmonised data sources and mandates from sponsors of research to make data accessible – to provide both transparency and to maximise re-use value. In this paper, I discuss four recent developments that are bringing challenges for social science data archives: methods for archiving qualitative data; providing safe access to disclosive data; institutional data archiving initiatives; and dealing with the emergence of ‘new’ data types.