Archiving Activities

The NSO Data Archivists are primarily statisticians and demographers from the different departments of the office. Their activities as archivists include the acquisition, documentation and anonymization of micro-data and related metadata.

 

Acquisition

The NSO Data Archive was primarily established to archive survey and census microdata produced by the NSO and administrative-based documents produced by other government agencies and mandated by law to be collected by NSO. 

 

Documentation

Data documentation serves several important functions. It helps data producers build institutional memory, and helps researchers to:

• Find the data they are interested in
• Locate the datasets and variables that meet their research requirements
• Understand what the data are measuring and how they data have been created, and assess their quality
• Understand the survey design and the methods used when collecting and processing the data, thereby reducing the risk that data will be misunderstood or misused.

The NSO Data Archivists are trained to adopt the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) and the Dublin Core (DCMI) international metadata standards in their documentation activities.

 

Anonymization

Statistical agencies are charged with legal and ethical obligations to protect the confidentiality of survey respondents. The NSO Data Archivist protects confidentiality of the data by:

• Restricting access to data that present a potential disclosure risk to scrutinized users only, under formal conditions
• Anonymizing data when necessary, by altering or suppressing variables which can potentially identify a physical or legal individual. This may make the data less useful for analysts. The NSO Data Archivists seek to minimize the information loss while ensuring an acceptable level of disclosure risk. Principles and methods applied for measuring the risk and for anonymizing data are those provided or recommended by the International Household Survey Network.