The Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA) was presented at several sessions of the IASSIST2016 conference held in Bergen, from 31 May to 3 June 2016. The principal session was the plenary session, “CESSDA sets the stage for the data infrastructure of the future”, held on 2 June.

This session presented to the audience CESSDA’s activities through engagement on an international level through both external and internal projects.

Four presenters contributed to this session:

• Vigdis Kvalheim, Chair of the session & Deputy director at NSD - Norwegian Centre for Research Data, and work package leader in CESSDA SaW,
• Ivana Ilijasic Versic, Acting Administrative Director, CESSDA AS, and partner in Big Data Europe,
• Elena Sommer, SERISS Coordination team, ESS (European Social Survey),
• Mari Kleemola, Development Manager, FSD (Finnish Social Science Data Archive).

The chair of the session presented a quick overview of CESSDA’s history, showing how CESSDA has evolved over time from an informal group of European social science data archives to the current established research infrastructure recognised as one of the Landmarks Research Infrastructures in the ESFRI 2016 Roadmap. CESSDA is currently made up of fifteen member countries and one observer, with many other countries actively working towards membership.

The chair then introduced the three ongoing Horizon 2020 projects in which CESSDA is involved and which were subsequently presented:

• CESSDA SaW - Strengthening and widening the European infrastructure for social science data archives
• Big Data Europe - Empowering Communities with Data Technologies
• SERISS - Synergies for Europe's Research Infrastructures in the Social Sciences

as well as the internal CESSDA project on metadata management led by FSD, the Finnish data archive, from the CESSDA consortium.

Two other presentations of CESSDA’s activities were made during the IASSIST16 conference:

• “Maturity Model for Assessing Data Infrastructures – CESSDA as an Example”, by Mike Priddy (DANS), Trond Kvamme (NSD), Maarten Hoogerwerf (DANS) and Marion Wittenberg (DANS) drawing from the CESSDA SaW project, during the “Data Services: Setting up and evaluating” session on 1 June.
• “CESSDA Research Infrastructure – Technical Framework”, by John Shepherdson (UKDA/UKDS), during the “Technical Data Infrastructure Framework” session on the same day.

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