QUADS Co-ordination Louise Corti QUADS Director, UKDA 28 September 2006

QUADS Aims Demonstrator Scheme for Qualitative Archiving and Data Sharing part of the ESRC's initiative to increase the UK resource of highly skilled researchers, and to fully exploit the distinctive potential offered by qualitative research and data main aim to develop and promote innovative methodological approaches to and new models for the archiving, sharing, re-use and secondary analysis of qualitative research and data aim to disseminate good practice in qualitative data sharing and research archiving

QUADS Objectives develop new models of qualitative research archiving and data sharing which tackle in innovative ways the epistemological, ethical, methodological and practical challenges raised by the re-use and re-analysis of qualitative material, and which explore ways of improving the quality of contextual information models may be of temporary, local or thematic archiving for example, which should complement the ESDS Qualidata approach, and of new or existing research collaborations - locally, nationally or internationally

draw primarily on existing qualitative research and data sets of a range of types. May also involve a combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches encourage researchers to explore the use of stored and shared video, visual and audio data sets promote understanding of the potential benefits and challenges of information and communication and e-science technologies in relation to media shifts and the changing nature of qualitative research QUADS Objectives

explore and extend the relationship between qualitative data producers, users and re- users and to demonstrate innovative and effective practice in these domains encourage the involvement of non-academic users and potential users of qualitative methods in opportunities to be methodologically innovative and to widen understanding in non-academic communities of the value and uses of qualitative data

QUADS Objectives promote innovative ways of speeding the process of adoption of methodological advances in relation to qualitative research archiving, data sharing, re-use and re- analysis, particularly in the transfer of experience between researchers operating in different substantive research areas and national research communities, and in the training of new researchers encourage networking and interchange

Awards £500,000 over 18 months: 6 awards – 5 demonstrators + coordination role Representing Context in a Research Archive of Educational Evaluation Studies P. Carmichael, M. James, J. Elliot and D. Bridges (Cambridge & UEA) Smart Qualitative Data: Methods and Community Tools for Data Mark-Up (SQUAD) L. Corti and C. Grover (Essex & Edinburgh) Negotiating the Long View: Archiving, Representing and Sharing a Qualitative Longitudinal Resource S. Henderson, J. Holland and R. Thomson (South Bank) Methodological issues in qualitative data sharing and archiving A. Coffey, B. Dicks and M. Williams (Cardiff) Collating and Preserving Primary Material on the Northern Ireland Conflict R. Miller and M. Melaugh (Queen's & Ulster) QUADS Coordination L. Corti (Essex)

Relationship to ESDS Qualidata ESDS Qualidata, through the UKDA, currently provides the ESRC RRB strategy for archiving, accessing and supporting users of qualitative research data QUADS outputs and workable models will link into and inform ESDS Qualidatas forward-thinking strategy and help set future priorities relatively small budget, small team, with limited funding not funded to do R&D work within current budget focus on getting whole or partial (highlights) collections digitised and web-accessible strong emphasis on developing community standards for describing data/metadata, but not well-resourced to do this limited focus on helping provide better context to inform re- use

Common ground selection, sorting, cleaning and preparation of archives systematically describing whats in this box/these boxes Metadata and domain specific ontologies web and metadata standards and compliance defining and capturing data and research context re-presentation of archives – including audio visual objects consent, confidentiality and IPR Sustainability of resources, technologies and tools

working with e-social science computer scientists in NLP/ JISC Centre for Text Mining international data archiving communities metadata experts Oxford Text Archive digital preservation experts National Centre for Research Methods etc