Towards standards for the description of machine-readable historical data

Abstract

Some years ago, the Center for Historical Social Research has started to archive and to disseminate machine-readable historical data for comparative and for secondary analyses. (1) This work has been accompanied by the development of a specific instrument for describing machine-readable historical data. This instrument has to meet the information needs of users of machine-readable historical data, information needs which are different to those of the users of machinereadable survey data. In this paper, standards for the description of machine-readable historical data are proposed which are also designed to become reporting standards for primary researchers in describing their data.