Advantages and new features of the DANS Data Stations compared to EASY

 

Trustworthy domain-specific repository service

Datasets can be published faster after being submitted as the curation process that the data managers of DANS perform is better supported by the architecture of the DANS Data Stations compared to EASY.

The DANS Data Stations make use of Dataverse – an Open Source repository software developed by Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS). The software is being further developed by a large international community in which DANS is an active contributor.  

Of course we follow the newest certification requirements set for trustworthy digital archives, and the DANS Data Stations are in the process of receiving the international CoreTrustSeal-certificate.

The DANS Data Stations are specifically tailored to your domain. Any questions you may have around depositing data or finding and reusing data can be addressed to one of the Data Station Managers. They have domain-specific expertise of the discipline you are interested in.

 

Depositing data

You can log into the DANS Data Station with your institutional account (SURFconext), Google or GitHub account. If you have previously deposited a dataset in EASY it will remain possible to log into the data station with your EASY account.  

For each individual file, you can decide to restrict access or apply an embargo period.

All of the Creative Commons licences are being supported. In addition, we also offer licences for software.

You can edit a dataset and create a new version. Changes to the metadata are registered as a minor version (1.0 becomes 1.1), whereas changes to the data are registered as a major version (1.0 becomes 2.0). All versions are kept and visible and you can retrieve an overview of the differences between the versions.

Collections are being supported. The thematic pages in EASY are called Collections in the DANS Data Station. A list of all collections is available and during deposit you can add a specific collection to a dataset. Collections are visible through a filter making it easy to select a certain collection of datasets for instance to narrow down a search or in combination with other filters. 

You can link external controlled vocabularies to your data. In this way, you can for instance describe social science datasets using terms from the European Language Social Science Thesaurus (ELSST). For archaeological datasets five lists with terms from the ‘archaeological basic register’ (Archeologisch Basis Register, ABR) are available. Terms from these vocabularies can also be used when searching for datasets. In the future the available vocabularies will be extended, in particular including vocabularies focused on the humanities domain.

 

Finding data

More filters are available in the DANS Data Stations which you can use to search for data and narrow down the results. These include: Year, Keyword Term, Language of Metadata.

In addition to the usual search, the DANS Data Stations offer ‘Advanced Search’ for almost all metadata fields and you can search through file-level metadata. 

The DANS Data Stations offer full-text indexing, so that not only metadata but also most files (e.g. PDF, xml etc.) are being indexed and searchable.

A dataset which has been deaccessioned can be marked with a so-called ‘tombstone’. This is a page which specifies why the data are no longer available. Where applicable the page also contains a reference to datasets replacing the original data.

 

Reuse of data

Within the DANS Data Station, you can view PDFs and images, and play audiovisual files directly in Dataverse previewers.

The files within a dataset can be searched and filters can be applied making it easier to select files to download. 

You can download data in different formats. Tabular datasets (like for instance SPSS) are automatically transformed into open formats (.tab) allowing users to read them into different programmes. 

Dataset metrics are available for all datasets: the number of downloads of the files and datasets are displayed in the interface. This way you can see how often a dataset has been downloaded.

 

Data citation

Citation information is not only available for datasets but also for individual files. This way, it has become easier to correctly cite files from datasets.

You can export citation information in several formats such as BibNote, RIS and BibTex. You can export the metadata of the datasets in different formats as well, such as Dublin Core, DDI, DataCite, JSON and Schema.org.

 

 

© DANS. R.4.5 Version 1.0, April 11, 2023