This publication is aimed at those engaged in the cycle of research, from applying for a research grant, through the data collection phase, and ultimately to preparation of the data for deposit in the DANS data archive, or any other data repository. It is a compilation of best practice gleaned from the experience of data archivists and investigators.

Many investigators are more than willing to make their data available to others, but are unsure of how to go about preparing data for outside use, particularly in terms of complete documentation. This publication focuses in large part, but not entirely, on quantitative data and is written with the assumption that the reader is familiar with basic concepts of computerized data files, such as variables, labels, codes, and so forth. Another assumption is that the vast majority of readers will be familiar with statistical software packages like SAS, SPSS, and Stata, which are used in social science research. Additionally, it addresses a variety of dataset formats: quantitative (survey, administrative), qualitative, and geospatial. The publication is intended to help researchers document their datasets and prepare them for archival deposit, as well as to think more broadly about the types of digital content that should be deposited in an archive.

This publication is an adaption of the 4th edition of the Guide to social science data preparation and archiving of 2009, published by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research – ICPSR at the University of Michigan in the United States. We like to thank Mary Vardigan and Ruth Shamraj, staff members of ICPSR, for their very generous permission to rewrite the original ICPSR publication for the social science research community in the Netherlands. As so far, in the Netherlands there is no any other publication available about preparing social science data for archiving with the ultimate goal to share the data with other researchers. To emphasize the focus of this edition for the Netherlands we gave it the title Preparing data for sharing, guide to social science data archiving.

We sincerely hope that this publication will encourage researchers and research institutions to contact DANS at any point in the research process to discuss their plans with respect to the preparation of public-use datasets.