November 2015

The Swedish Research Council has appointed SND as a national resource for the coordination of existing and newly established databases within the social sciences, humanities and health sciences. SND offers support to Swedish research by facilitating researchers’ access to data within and outside of Sweden as well as offer support for research during the whole research process. SND presents Swedish research outside of Sweden.

An important part of SND’s mission is to gain a very good overview of existing research databases and to endeavour to gain full knowledge of future databases within the social sciences, humanities and social medicine (epidemiology). Our main task is to take stock of databases relevant to research as well as support archiving, usage and re-use of databases and related research materials on a national level within SND’s fields of responsibility. An overall purpose is to secure the quality of all parts of the organisation as well as to provide the research community with support and services to preserve, organise, maintain and disseminate data materials for the purpose of research within SND’s discipline areas. Our task is also to collect and spread information on databases and data/material collections, data types, metadata and file format. SND shall contribute to the technical development of standards, methods and tools for documentation aiming to increase the availability of research data.

SND's webpage is central for the spreading of information, dissemination of data as well as information on diverse types of data. SND works actively for cross discipline collaboration as well as developing and broadening participation in national and international networks within the discipline areas. In the endeavours to gain a complete overview of future databases, SND cooperates with the concerned research councils and statistic producing bodies. SND aims to provide possibilities for cooperation and support for researchers in their research projects, thus creating the potential to invest in important strategic areas, such as specific technical development and the investigation of legal approaches to problems.

Within Swe-Clarin, SND is an A centre. That is a mainly technical function which includes creating and maintaining a metadata registry about Swe-Clarin resources and tools and keeping the registry compatible with CLARIN ERIC systems, providing resources with permanent identifiers and the project with sustainable long-term archiving.

Rights: Kloniwotski (CC-BY 2.0)

An eventful autumn nears its end and a lot has happened within Swe-Clarin. The latest event was the second consortial meeting in Stockholm on November 17th and the workshop at KTH the day before. The next newsletter will report from the workshop that gave rise to interesting discussions.

At the consortial meeting all partners informed of their CLARIN-related activities throughout the year and it became clear that there is plenty of interesting, ongoing activities within the consortium which will gradually become more visible at the Swe-Clarin web page. Meeting notes will be available on the web page during December.

The next virtual meeting will take place on the 11th December.