Aila and Metka: FSD's new tools for the trade

This poster introduces Aila and Metka, two brand new tools for the Finnish Social Science Data Archive (FSD). Aila is FSD’s new web based customer service portal. It will be our main tool for data dissemination. Aila allows customers to search, browse and review our data descriptions on study and variable level, and after registration, download data directly from the service portal. We will demonstrate the functionality of the portal and share the experiences gained during the building phase and the first few months of operation. Metka will be FSD’s tool for managing metadata. Metadata will be entered to Metka, which in turn will feed other systems at FSD (e.g., Aila). This will greatly simplify building services based on our rich metadata as it allows repurposing metadata from a single authorative source. We will present Metka’s features and show how it connects to FSD’s services and other systems. The system will be operational in January 2015. Metka is open source and can be obtained from github. With Aila and Metka, we have defined the software platform FSD will utilise in building new tools for the archive and services for our customers. For example, Shibboleth will be used consistently for user authentication.