Release of the Census Resource Discovery System

Citation

(2004), "Release of the Census Resource Discovery System", The Electronic Library, Vol. 22 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/el.2004.26322aab.015

Release of the Census Resource Discovery System

Release of the Census Resource Discovery System

The Census Resource Discovery System (CRDS) has been launched. Between October 2001 and July 2003, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) funded the development and implementation of the CRDS at the UK Data Archive (University of Essex). This development resulted in one of the outputs from the Collection of Historical and Contemporary Censuses (CHCC) project.

The system is W3C compliant and facilitates resource discovery of both census data and the associated CHCC learning and teaching materials via an Open Archives Initiative-compliant metadatabase.

Users can locate resources, both census datasets and learning and teaching materials, by time, geography and keyword. The datasets and the learning and teaching materials are directly available from links within their records (although users wishing to access the datasets must register with the Census Registration Service first).

A census-specific set of keywords has been developed, using terms taken from HASSET and the Social Research Methodology thesauri. A common set of metadata standards was adopted in the system's development. The metadatabase uses the Data Documentation Initiative to catalogue the datasets and, following extension funding from the JISC, has been upgraded to use the UK Learning Object Metadata Framework for the learning and teaching materials. Additional metadata will be added throughout the remainder of 2003, and as new datasets from the 2001 Census become available.