Since Fudan University (Shanghai, China) publicly launched their Fudan University Dataverse repository on December 2014, they have collected over 46,000 files from 1,319 researchers and 5,796 projects that are affiliated with the university.
The Fudan Dataverse repository currently has datasets ranging from: research findings, working papers, journal papers, and social science data. The majority of their current datasets are survey and census data deposited by Fudan University affiliated researchers working in demography, economics, social science, geography, etc. The most common file types they see include: text files, data files (i.e. dta, spss, xls, csv, etc), image files (i.e. jpg), and GIS data.
Listed below are some of their larger collections:
- Nationwide Population Census
- Fudan Yangtze River Delta Social Transformation Survey (FYRST)
- Population, Consumption and Carbon Emission
- Fudan Energy
The official launch ceremony of the Fudan University Dataverse with Lin Shangli (vice president), Peng Xizhe, Pan Kexi, Lu Weidong, and Yin Shenqin light the electric crystal ball.
Fudan University was also the first Dataverse repository to internationalize the language of Dataverse’s user-interface by translating it to also be available (and searchable) in Chinese. Prior to their generous development contributions to the Dataverse’s open source code, the Dataverse only had an English language interface available. Fudan University’s Dataverse team of developers are currently collaborating with the Dataverse development team at Harvard University’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science to make sure this internationalization is more closely integrated with the upcoming Dataverse version 4.0 so that other languages can more easily be made available in the interface.
The Fudan University Dataverse team provide many services to encourage their researchers to move their data from their local hard disks to be safely preserved in their repository. Some of the services they offer include:
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Curation & Data Management Services: helping their researchers describe their data and other files, converting files to preservation-friendly formats, cleaning of the original data to make it easier for others to reuse, etc.
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Specialized Language Search: provide a Chinese search engine with Chinese word segmentation, which is unique to this particular Dataverse repository.
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Branding & Customization: helping make customized banners for many of their researchers’ Dataverses.
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Outreach & Promotional Tools: in addition to releasing newsletters (see one of their newsletters at the bottom of this blog post), the faculty and students recently prepared a series of three promo videos entitled "I Speak for Fudan University Dataverse", which were released on the WeChat platform (the biggest mobile social network site in China). Links to the videos are listed below:
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Yin Shenqin and Zhang Jilong from Fudan University for helping us put together this blog post.
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Newsletter from Fudan University Dataverse Network
On October 23-24, 2014, a seminar on Scientific Research and Practice of China academic Library and a seminar on Shanghai academic scientific platform and institutional repository, were held in Fudan University. More than 50 deputy directors and technologist from twenty academic libraries took part in the seminars.
Nine Universities, including Peking University, Tsinghua University, Zhejiang University, Wuhan University, Beijing Institute of Technology, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Shanghai International Studies University, Tongji University, and Fudan University, jointly initiated the establishment of “China Academic Library Research Data Management Implementation Group”, in order to promote the development of Chinese domestic Research Data Management. The Secretariat was set up in Fudan University.