The UK Data Service delivers the data that promote evidence-based social research and policies. Hear from Darren Bell, Director of Technical Services.

The CESSDA Country Spotlight series showcases national service providers. We interviewed representatives of the national service providers, dear members of the CESSDA community. We asked them about the value CESSDA provides their data archive and vice versa. 

The UK Data Service

The UK Data Service delivers the data that promote evidence-based social research and policies. This comprehensive resource is funded by the ESRC to support researchers, teachers and policymakers who depend on high-quality social and economic data.

They provide a single point of access to a wide range of secondary data including large-scale government surveys, international macrodata, business microdata, qualitative studies and census data.

The UK Data Service has an extensive training events programme of webinars, face-to-face workshops and user conferences.

Director of Technical Services Darren Bell about CESSDA

“The CESSDA Data Catalogue is really important because rather than just searching and having access to repositories in your own country, you can actually access datasets from around Europe which might be from Norway, Germany or Slovenia. So the CESSDA Data Catalogue does a really good job of pulling in all the metadata from 22 or more different service providers.

Although it still might not always be straightforward accessing data from another country, it does show you what is available in other European countries and gets you on the journey towards being able to access that data.” Darren Bell, Director of Technical Services at the UK Data Service.

More information:

• Discover UK datasets in the CESSDA Data Catalogue
• Find out more about UK Data Service
• Read the previous Country Spotlight