The Meta Information System of the Social and Cultural Planning Office
The Social and Cultural Planning Office (SCP) conducts independent research
on social and cultural aspects of Dutch government policy. For this type of
research surveys are often a major source of information. The Meta Information
System of the Social and Cultural Planning Office, MISS, is an MS-Access application
with information about the surveys and their data files. Part of this information
is available at the SCP web site.
Content MISS
MISS contains administrative, checklist-like information (e.g. the year the
data were received, what project they were used for, whether the files are already
available), information about the datafiles (e.g. number of variables and cases,
and the pathname on our system) and information about the surveys, with the
usual items like survey method, time period covered, sample size and respons
rate, and research organisation. This last part of MISS, the survey information,
is the meta information that has been made available on the SCP web site.
PDF-format: appendix in publications
Current SCP-publications on paper have a standard Appendix with a description
of the surveys used. This appendix is based upon information from MISS, edited
in a word processing program. As the SCP web site contains all SCP publications
full text in pdf-format, it also contains this standard appendix. Some survey
description data from MISS are therefor on line available in pdf-format.
HTML-format: short survey descriptions
Apart from these appendices the website also contains independent 'short survey
descriptions' in html-format. These descriptions offer the same information
as MISS and the appendices in wordperfect- or pdf-format, but they are enriched
with links to questionnaires and other survey information, if available in electronic
format. Where possible a link is added to the institution where one can obtain
the data files, for instance the Steinmetz Archive for SCP surveys.
Under 'Enquêtes' / 'Algemeen' / 'Surveys' one gets a list
with available descriptions. On clicking on the name of a survey the short
description itself is shown.
Planned extensions
The short descriptions are mainly meant for those interested in the quality
of analyses in our publications. That's why we want to add hyperlinks
from the tables in the on line publications to the description of the surveys
used to generate the tables. Furthermore the descriptions are only available
in the Dutch version. Another planned extension is an English translation
of the descriptions.
At the moment the information is available in at least three formats: in the
MS-Access-tables, Word Perfect-documents and html-files, which are kept consistent
with 'copy and paste'. For this reason we are investigating the possibilities
of XML in extracting the information in different formats.
The on line survey meta information is static: it is not dynamically extracted
from the database and there are no search facilities.That is because our first
objective in putting the meta data on our site was to to enhance transparency
by giving an account of the quality of the data used. We want visitors of the
site, or, more specifically, the scientific community, to be able to find out
upon which data our research is based and where they might obtain that data.
In a later stage, however, we intend to include dynamic search facilities.
Social and Cultural Planning Office of the Netherlands
Postbus 16164
2500 BD
Den Haag
Netherlands