With support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Arab Public Data Initiative, housed at the Odum Institute Data Archive at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partnership with the Arab Council for the Social Sciences, has launched the first interdisciplinary social-science data archive in the Arab region, in an effort to preserve original research findings and make them freely available to researchers, and has trained a cadre of specialists to train researchers in the region in data management practices, including data preservation.
The University of Oxford joined the Initiative in the new phase of the project (2023-2025). The initiative now seeks to broaden the scale of data archiving in the Arab region with new strategies to promote the norms of data preservation and access. The project seeks to archive historic census data, geographic data from maps, and historic newspapers from the region, in addition to ongoing deposits of survey data; to conduct data management workshops throughout the Arab region; to partner with universities and research organizations in the region to incorporate data archiving into their own training and research processes; and to engage with data archiving efforts in other regions of the world to learn best practices and share the initiative’s own lessons learned.
