What is the UK Data Archive?

The UK Data Services is supported and run by the ESRC, an acronym for Economic and Social Research Council. Their key objective is to fulfil the need of data for students, teachers and researchers from different sectors. UK Data Archive is helpful for commercial sectors, charities and foundations, central and local government, the academic world, research organizations and business consultants.

What Type of Data is collected By UK Data Service?

UK Data Archive includes and gives access to the UK’s largest collection of digital records about the UK and international population, economic and social data. It is actually the gigantic collection of digital research data in the social sciences and humanities. The UK Data Service includes UK census data, longitudinal studies, cross-national surveys, leading UK government-sponsored surveys, international aggregate, qualitative data and business data.

With UK Data Archive you get:

• Guidance and training required for the development of skills in data usage
• Access to exclusive international, national, regional and local economic and social data
• The flexibility of storing and sharing of skill with international data providers to eliminate barriers to accessing useful data
• Support for policy-related research
• The necessary guidance and training for best practice data storing and sharing standards

University of Essex is the chief organisation of the UK Data Service. It is an internationally accredited centre of expertise in the collection, curating and providing easy access to the collection of digital data. UK Data Archive is also the base for the ADRN, Administrative Data Research Network. It gives qualified economic and social researchers secure access to linked, de-identified administrative data. Through several strategic investments by Economic and Social Research, the United Kingdom academic community gets useful access to a collection of contemporary and historical census data and other related resources available and accessible in digital format.

The data collections stored in the UK Data Archive point towards the matters that influence all our lives and experiences, both domestic and globally. It covers every continent, right from birth to education, employment, social interaction and on to old age. All the data are managed in a way so that it remains accessible and explicable for long-term use. The main objective of UK Data Archive is to curate high-quality, exclusive research data for analysis and reuse purpose.

UK Data Archive— Why Data Archiving?

You may very well be the king of regular backing up your data, but data archiving is a completely different ball game. With the data explosion in recent years, archiving of data has become a necessity as organizations work to preserve hosts of systems that create various types of data. Archiving research data means storing it to a data centre, repository or archive where it will be protected in the long term against deterioration, loss, illegal or inappropriate access, and future inappropriateness. Archiving is a crucial first step for data sharing, but it is still essential to archive data even if you don’t want to share them with anyone.

Both corporate and government IT organizations are bumping heads with the unstable growth in data that is building up in different business applications such as ERP and CRM systems, inclusive of seldom-used legacy applications. Uniting that challenge with growing regulatory requirements for superior data retention and it becomes understandable that there’s a bigger need than ever for effectual data archiving solutions.

Data Archiving Solution providers can help the organization by handling the growing data volumes securely. Data archiving is efficiently and safely implemented for important application data, offering IT seamless and easy access to data and assisting them to deliver it to the business stakeholders as required— effortlessly and cost-effectively.

With the help of good Data Archiving solution, IT can recognize and shift unused data from enterprise applications and production databases to another database or to a safe, highly compressed, permanent file. Application-specific business rules make sure that data integrity is preserved even after data archiving has been done. It:

• Helps easy and safe access to archived data
• Improves performance of production applications and databases while cutting down the costs
• Supports compliance by allowing more efficient and quicker responses to audit demands

Archiving is vitally essential for information management and can offer a business better control over their efficient information processes. As a business or organization grows it will generate more data— important data that needs to be carefully managed and monitored in order to be used properly. If data is not archived properly it can be harder to secure, locate and suitably distribute if stored in a local storage— like hard disk or laptop— and thus it will be unreachable to others. This can ultimately give a bad impact on employee productivity and business functions.

Which Data to Archive?

It might seem safest to store all of the crucial data that you produce during the time of your project, but doing this you may finish up with problems. For instance, temporary and intermediate processing files can fill up your file system and hold back vital data by making it difficult to locate the files that you are actually looking for. Moreover, without strong version control, you might finish off using older or outdated versions of files or data accidentally. Additionally, if you are producing a big amount of data you can experience the risk of going beyond the limits of your storage devices. That’s why it is important to do proper data storage and look for the best data storage solution for your business.

Generally, you should keep:

• Data that are often reused
• Data that’s difficult to reproduce
• Data that’s too expensive to reproduce
• All data behind publications
• Data needed for legal, contractual or policy reason
• Data that are of possible future importance to your research area

Storing and sharing data with an expert data centre ensures:

• Enduring conservation and back-up of data
• Safety of research data in a top-notch secure environment
• Resource finding of data through the enclosure in online catalogues
• Supervision for data access
• Rights management of data (licensing issues)
• Promotion of archived data to user groups
• Increasing the visibility of your data and allowing more use and citation
• Management and monitoring of data usage

To conclude, no matter what your motive for archiving data, the storage system should deliver data scalability, integrity, and power management. Archiving is important for business continuity and guaranteeing the utmost level of performance in a tough competitive marketplace. Sharing your data through the Archive makes sure that your data will be competently curated, will be easily and safely accessible to users now and in the future and enhances the visibility and impact of your own research.