International Association for Social Science Information Service and Technology
Abstract
Over the past two decades significant developments have occurred in the archiving of qualitative data in the UK. The first national archive for qualitative resources, Qualidata, was established in 1994. Since that time
further scientific reviews have supported the expansion of data resources for qualitative and qualitative longitudinal (QL) research in the UK and fuelled the development of
a new ethos of data sharing and re-use among qualitative researchers. These have included the Timescapes Study and
Archive, an initiative funded from 2007 to scale up QL research and create a specialist resource of QL data for
sharing and re-use. These trends are part of a wider movement to enhance the status of research data in all
their diverse forms, inculcate an ethos of data sharing, and develop infrastructure to facilitate data discovery and re-use. In this paper we trace the history of these developments and provide an overview of data policy initiatives that have set out to advance data sharing
in the UK. The paper reveals a mixed infrastructure for
qualitative and QL data resources in the UK, and explores
the value of this, along with the implications for managing
and co-ordinating resources across a complex network.
The paper concludes with some suggestions for developing
this mixed infrastructure to further support data
sharing and re-use in the UK and beyond
