Strategies of Promoting the Use of Survey Research Data Archive
The Survey Research Data Archive (SRDA) at Academia Sinica in Taiwan has large collections of data from both the government and the academia. In a recent survey on the more than 3,000 active researchers in humanities and social sciences, however, 52% did not hear of SRDA. Among those who ever tried SRDA but gave up (N=257), 17% complained that information provided about data sets was insufficient for an effective search, and another 17% said similarly that they could not find what they needed. Basically, the improvements that SRDA must make are sketched in the above survey results, i.e., the promotion of SRDA and better and more metadata for the archived datasets. For these goals, we devise several strategies. First, produce demonstrations of uses of survey data sets on the website. Second, make power point files of SRDA introductions and send them to college professors for use in class or for research reference. Third, revise abstracts and keywords of datasets. Fourth, construct metadata on Nesstar. Fifth, add a search function that bridges the gap between the restricted and non-restricted data collections.