Producing Archive-Ready Datasets: Compliance, Incentives, and Motivation

Digital archiving assumes some degree of cooperation between data producers and data archives. Experience shows that current incentives are insufficient to overcome the obstacles that data producers report to providing complete and accurate documentation with their data. A multidisciplinary team of experts in digital archiving, social science research, and experimental economics at the School of Information and ICPSR are investigating ways to increase cooperation between producers and archives. With their government partner, the National Institute of Justice, researchers use multiple methods (surveys and experiments) to identify barriers to compliance, revise guidelines and responsibilities, and develop and test alternative incentive mechanisms. This presentation will report on initial findings from a survey about the obstacles that data producers face when they deposit data in an archive.nbsp;