title: Congregating Socio- Economic Datasets for Scholastic Research: A Case Study in IIMB Library
creators: K. Rama Patnaik
abstract: Digital curation initiatives with an intention to preserve the intellectual content of an institute gained momentum in the early 1990s with open source technologies facilitating such efforts. Indian Institute of Management Library (hitherto referred as IIMB library in this paper) heralded onto a new path of making primary datasets about socio-economic datasets, including the massive census reports in the digital domain. In the year 2014 all National Sample Surveys from the Government of India and Census reports from 1881 to 1941 were digitized for internal circulation purposes only. Though these efforts were a small step towards digital curation, it raised expectations from the user community on the computational potential and data mining abilities of these datasets. But to accomplish it, the challenges of digital perpetuity, technological obsolescence, dissemination expanded to the public, copyright issues have to be overcome.
keywords: social science data sets social surveys india