Paper short abstract:

The purpose of the article is to present guidelines of the Slovenian Social Science Data Archives (ADP) for the acquisition and archiving and recommendations for editing of ethnographic that take into consideration widely accepted best practices, international standards, recommendations and tools.

Paper long abstract:

One of the main problems related to the use of digitisation and datafication in social and cultural anthropology concerns the representation of data for input, processing, and output. Ethnographic data is often rich and complex, non-standardised in format, without common or consistent metadata and ontologies. It also can be subject to complex rights issues. Consensus and best practice regarding digitisation and metadata standards for common usage, that still retain the richness of different research projects and data types, could enable open access to ethnographic data, and facilitate data exchange.

The purpose of the article is to present guidelines for the acquisition and archiving of qualitative research data in the Slovenian Social Science Data Archives (ADP), which were prepared as a complement to the existing working procedures of archiving predominately quantitative studies. To this end, we have developed guidelines for the acquisition and archiving of ethnographic research data and recommendations for the editing of ethnographic data for researchers and data archivists that took into consideration best practices, international standards, recommendation and tools from working and interest groups of the Research Data Alliance (RDA), working groups and international projects of the CESSDA ERIC (Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives), guidelines and recommendations by the UK Data Archive, and the Finnish Social Science Data Archive.