CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS:
RETAINING AND RE-USING OFFICIAL STATISTICS
NB this is about a meeting I am organising as a member of the Royal
Statistical Society Official Statistics section, but other Radstats members
have an interest in this area and may be interested in contributing.
The theme of the meeting, planned for sometime next autumn, is "retaining
and re-using official statistics" and "retaining" is about a very specific
process: the decisions taken by government departments, working with the
National Archives (TNA -- formerly the Public Record Office), about which
materials will be selected for indefinite archiving, rather than destroyed.
The fact that documents are retained does not mean they will be publicly
accessible, but if they are destroyed they obviously won't be. NB there may
be a separate RSS meeting on the impact of the Freedom of Information Act
on official statistics; the focus of what is proposed here is a bit more
on actual practice, tho' it may well help identify policy issues.
Until fairly recently, the main focus of retention policy seems to have
been on recording the development of administrative processes, rather than
the development of society. However, TNA has clearly tried to shift its
focus and one aspect of this was the creation of the National Digital
Archive of Datasets (NDAD), which is operated under contract to TNA by the
University of London Computer Centre. A list of datasets currently
available from NDAD is here:
http://ndad.ulcc.ac.uk/access
This was set up in the late 1990s, and in 1998 the RSS hosted a one-day
meeting on archiving statistics, including speakers from NDAD, TNA and
ONS. The idea of this new, shorter meeting is to look at how well the
system is actually operating. The person with primary responsibility for
the appraisal of statistical datasets within TNA has offered to speak, and
I am approaching ONS and NDAD, but we also need contributions from
statistics users:
<> Examples of how "old statistics" have been put to good use (and not
necessarily because they have been retained through this new system). One
area that may provide examples is that we now know that conditions in early
childhood have a big impact on health in later life, which has led to a lot
of burrowing into old sources.
<> Examples of particular analyses that could not be done because data had
been destroyed. Does that list on the NDAD web site -- "British bats",
"Beer duty system" -- reflect the right set of priorities? (NB if you have
not seen this list before, don't be surprised that the big ONS surveys are
not there -- there are separate arrangements with the Essex Data Archive,
and I think there are a few other devolved archiving arrangements that
predate NDAD being set up)
NB what we are NOT looking for is people wanting to present hour-long
papers. This is about short presentations that build into a debate.
No specific date has been set for the meeting, but it would be "after the
summer". The venue would be the Royal Statistical Society, in London near
Old Street tube. Duration probably two hours in the late afternoon, but
could be longer if there is a lot of interest. For now, these meetings are
open to all-comers free of charge (although the RSS is STARTING to worry
that people who keep coming really should join).
Please reply to me with any offers to participate, or suggestions of other
people to contact. Please cross-post to other relevant lists.
Humphrey Southall
====================================
Humphrey Southall
Reader in Geography/Director,
Great Britain Historical GIS Project
Department of Geography, University of Portsmouth
Buckingham Building, Lion Terrace, Portsmouth PO1 3HE
GIS Project Office: (023) 9284 2500
Home office: (020) 8853 0396
Mobile: 0796 808 5454
Web site: http://www.VisionOfBritain.org.uk
About us: http://www.gbhgis.org
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