Pilot Project for an International Data Service Center (IDSC) at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
The International Data Service Center (IDSC) is intended to identify and communicate information about data relevant to the labor market. As a meta-information portal, German datasets are made available for international research projects and datasets from outside the country are made available to German researchers.
On the basis of existing thesauri and in cooperation with the relevant Research Data Centers and Data Service Centers, a module will be developed for the area of labor market data. This thesaurus and other metadata information will document and index data from a labor economics perspective. The International Data Service Center, funded by the Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF: Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung) thus represents a significant expansion of services provided by existing institutions.
In line with the legal restrictions on data use, the data can only be used on-site at the Data Service Center. Guest researchers at the IZA will also be granted the right to use the data available at the Data Service Center. The creation of a controlled remote data processing system will take place subject to legal usage regulations.
Objectives and Services:
The primary goal of the International Data Service Center of the IZA is to improve the accessibility and usefulness of microdata relevant for labor market research. The IDSC is committed to the pursuit of the following three overarching objectives:
- To make relevant information about international datasets on labor market research available for secondary analysis through a meta-information portal on labor market research. For the most part, both national and international microdata are only available peripherally, and generally restricted to use in their respective national data archives. Research that searches across archives, therefore, is limited by the varying standardization of the metadata. The IDSC is designed to solve this problem through its establishment of a central, internationally standardized metadata information system.
- To enable indirect access to the most important labor market datasets. The selection of these datasets will be made on the basis of close contact between the IZA, international research institutes, and researchers, with the help surveys distributed to the IZA fellows. Data access, in line with legal restrictions, will be provided in two ways. Insofar as legally permitted, researchers can process data remotely by way of the (Schalterstelle), a contact person in charge of the virtual database. If, for legal reasons, remote access is prohibited, data may be utilized through the existing IZA guest researcher program, which requires the user to receive advance permission from the primary data distributor.
- 3To make German datasets available internationally. In cooperation with the Research Data Centers and Data Service Centers, international researchers can gain access to designated datasets through the use of a Schalterstelle. These datasets might include, according to the results of the IZA Fellows Survey: the German Microcensus, the Income and Expenditure Survey, the Time Use Survey, the Employment Sample, the Regional Sample, and the Employment Panel. This would assume that IZA and the primary data producers have developed and implemented adequate legal and technical standards for data access.
Kontakt: International Data Service Center of IZA (IDSC)
IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany
Phone: +49-228-3894-503
Fax: +49-228-3894-180
E-mail: idsc@iza.org
Web: http://idsc.iza.org
