ABSTRACT
Social science data archives provide services in the area of acquisition, processing, documenting and making available various kinds of social data. They are major facilities for empirical social research, especially for comparative research. In order to conduct this research to a high level, an adequate infrastructure is required that is able to provide an essential service to the research teams. The archival networks are contributing to making national data resources internationally available. In this way, they are enabling the international science community to share available data and contributing to the accumulation of knowledge by contrasting data from different sources.
