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On a smaller scale, some of my undergraduate students conducted surveys (to professional standards under my supervision) as part of their 2nd year group projects or for their 3rd year placement agencies. The then Polytechnic of North London (PNL) was funded by the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) as a teaching , not research, institution. At the end of each academic year, all student disk allocations were systematically wiped, not backed up. This resulted in permanent loss of interesting and potentially valuable data in SPSS *.sav files. As soon as I discovered this ridiculous practice I subsequently included all student research projects under my own Survey Research Unit disk allocation. When I early retired in 1992, PNL were about to wipe my disk area. Fortunately, an alert and sympathetic operator backed up all contents to seven 2000 ft mag tapes. Under the impression that the UK Data Archive at Essex was using SPSS on a DEC-10 I took these tapes to them. However, it turned out they no longer had a DEC-10, but were using SPSS for Windows on networked PCs. Three years later, when I asked what was happening to my data, I was sent two CDs onto which all data had been copied, but the files were impossible to read until I discovered that the filename suffixes needed to have the edition number deleted (*.sav_1 becomes *.sav et Voilà!) Most of these files have now been restored, but Essex has moved on to "Big Data" and there seems to be no place for curation of small-scale studies. Another problem I had is that SRU conducted some collaborative studies with other agencies, some of which no longer exist. Tracking down "owners" is now difficult if not impossible, but Robin Rice pointed me to Figshare as a possible home for "orphan" works: ReShare is monitored and some "orphans" works may not be accepted. Examples include: Aughterson K and Foley K Opportunity Lost: a survey of the intentions and attitudes of young people as affected by the proposed system of student loans National Union of Students, 1989 (Authorisation to deposit data eventually obtained 2018) Dr J Littlewood Primary Care Nurses. Survey conducted in 1986 By Dr J Littlewood for City and E London Area Health Authority of four kinds of primary care nurses working in six health districts. (Authorisation impossible to obtain: no report traced) Data now deposited with Edina http://stats.datalib.edina.ac.uk/sdaweb/analysis/?dataset=pcn89 Dr Mark Abrams Beyond Three-score and 10 Age Concern 1978 (Age Concern Panel Survey 1977-1980. No report found on 1980 follow-up, but data still available) Any offers? John F Hall MA (Cantab) Dip Ed (Dunelm) [Retired academic survey researcher] Email: [log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]> Website: Journeys in Survey Research <http://surveyresearch.weebly.com/> Course: Survey Analysis Workshop (SPSS) <http://surveyresearch.weebly.com/1-survey-analysis-workshop-spss.html> Research: Subjective Social Indicators (Quality of Life) <http://surveyresearch.weebly.com/3-subjective-social-indicators-quality-of-life.html> PS I still have some student materials on 5½ and 3¼ floppies, but no means of reading them. ######################################################################## To unsubscribe from the RESEARCH-DATAMAN list, click the following link: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=RESEARCH-DATAMAN&A=1