Disseminating Survey Information in the Networked World: A UK Resource

The first article is a paper presented at the IASSIST 2006 conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan, at the session: “Moving Beyond Data to Networked Knowledge.” Julie Lamb, from the Department of Sociology at University of Surrey in the UK, is the author of “Disseminating Survey Information in the Networked World: A UK Resource.” The paper discusses the development and use of the Question Bank, an innovative Web resource which is used to teach students and researchers about UK social surveys with a focus on large-scale quantitative surveys. Currently, the Question Bank contains the full questionnaires for over 50 surveys produced by agencies such as the Office for National Statistics and the National Centre for Social Research. The Question Bank supports reuse of survey questions and the accompanying coding frames, including information about the surveys, and often this is used as a benchmark for new surveys.