The Slovenian Social Science Data Archives (ADP) of the University of Ljubljana (UL)

The Slovenian Social Science Data Archives (ADP) of the University of Ljubljana (UL) were established in year 1997. The main tasks are to acquire significant data sources with a wide range of social science disciplines of interest to Slovenian social scientists, check them and prepare for digital preservation, and disseminate them for further use for scientific, educational, and other purposes.

ADP are members of the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives – CESSDA. ADP participated in the regional contexts (e. g., The East European Data Archive Network – EDAN) and in the preparatory project (CESSDA PPP) to build an integrated European social science infrastructure in the scope of ESFRI (European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures), as well as partners in the SERSCIDA project, where support for the establishment of a regional Social Science data Archives was given. In addition, ADP is a partner in the project Data without Boundaries (DwB), which aims to enhance cooperation between the academic data archives and statistical offices to provide access to micro-data for research. Furthermore, ADP conducted a national project under the short title ‘Open data’, which resulted in an ‘Action Plan for the Establishment of a System of Open Access to Publicly Funded Research Data in Slovenia’. The project and its findings were broadly presented in the report “Open data. Action Plan for the Establishment of a System of Open Access to Publicly Funded Research Data in Slovenia” URN:NBN:SI:DOC-US3XRRB2. Additional training and preparation of materials on Open data and RDM for Slovenia were in 2014 supported by the FOSTER project.

Sonja Bezjak PhD is employed at ADP since 2012 as an expert assistant. She is primarily engaged with issues related to open access to research data. She is a co-author of ‘Open data. Action Plan for the Establishment of a System of Open Access to Publicly Funded Research Data in Slovenia’ (2013), and participated in organizing open data workshops, where she presented several topics related to: research data policy, data citation, data journals, and research data management planning in Slovenia. She is also actively participating in the ADP team for training of users and depositors of research data.

Irena Vipavc Brvar is employed in ADP as an expert assistant since 2002. She is primarily engaged with users and data depositor relations, having workshops about access to research data of high quality in domestic and international data catalogues, and data management planning. One of her responsibilities is to teach younger generations of archivists in Slovenia and other East European Countries (SERSCIDA project) about preparing descriptions of studies. She is involved in larger projects such as preparation of data files and documentation of surveys from the Statistical Office of Slovenia, preparation of materials from ADP for long-term preservation in collaboration with the team at National and University Library of Slovenia. She is also teaching assistant at the ECPR summer school and co-organizer of the annual international conference Applied Statistics, and member of executive board of the Slovene Statistical Society.

Janez Štebe PhD is assistant professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, and is Head of the Slovenian Social Science Data Archives ADP. He has presented numerous articles to promote secondary analysis of survey data in archive holdings. He is also partially engaged as a researcher and is a member of Public Opinion and Mass Communication Research Centre research group, the leading academic survey research center in Slovenia, since 1989. He participated in numerous international and national projects on research data infrastructures, and advises on digital preservation and open access policy issues.