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One goal of the Data-PASS Partnership is to find and preserve potentially "at-risk" data sets for future generations of social science researchers. These data sets can take on many forms and be found on obsolete media including paper tape, punched cards, as well as, magnetic tape and disk. Based on the collaborative efforts of Data-PASS partners and focused on both the physical and logical aspects of recovery, this poster describes and documents efforts to rescue, read, process, and migrate multi-punched card data to modern formats.

During the past several years the Roper Center has been reprocessing older data collections in order to make them available directly to researchers via RoperExpress download service. In a technical sense reprocessing of data files (particularly from IBM colbin binary-to-ASCII formats) seems fairly straightforward, but in order to bring more enhanced data resources, more fully developed metadata is desirable. But discovery and integration of methodological and variable level metadata for studies that are over 30 years old can be challenging. This paper will focus on several reprocessing case studies encountered over the past year, and from their unique scenarios try to develop a framework to guide this unique brand of detective work.

Online analysis of survey data files has been of significant interest to the Roper Center for a number of years. Integrating a data analysis system with existing finding aids would be of tremendous value to a wide variety of researchers. Dedicating resources to such an effort requires an evaluation of appropriate alternatives. This paper will present an evaluation of two current data analysis systems: NESSTAR and Survey Data Analysis (SDA). While not exhaustive in scope, this evaluation will focus on criteria pertaining to the Center's desire to integrate an exploratory analysis system with the iPOLL public opinion question databank. Evaluation criteria will include preparation of system files, system maintenance, ease of integration, performance issues and presentation features, among others.

As presented at IASSIST 2003 conference