Data services for Czech sociology

The article concerns the benefits of social data services and secondary data analysis and the past and current situation in data archiving in the Czech Republic. A debate concerning the formation of a social science data archive was opened in the late 1960s, but the ideas were brought to fruition in the late 1990s. The Sociological Data Archive (SDA) was founded in 1998 and it is the only institution that systematically provides access to data files from quantitative sociological surveys. The main access to the data library is provided on the internet. The SDA also pays great attention to promoting secondary analysis and the employment of existing data sources and co-operates in organising large research projects, especially the Czech participation in the ISSP. The SDA is a member of the CESSDA (Council of European Social Science Data Archives). This also means that the Archive can mediate access to materials stored in other social science data archives in Europe. The full inclusion of the SDA's services into an international network is connected to the adoption of international standards (DDI, XML technology), which is planned for the future. In recent years two qualitative data archives have also been established, the Czech Archive of Qualitative Data and Documents and the Digital Archive of Soft Data MEDARD, The Czech Statistical Office provides data services in the field of official statistics.