News from NDAD

Six new datasets are now available from the Schools’ Census (Form 7) series (CRDA/13) (References: CRDA/13/DS/5/1996 All schools 1996 to CRDA/13/DS/5/2001 All schools 2001).

NB: After 1996, new legislation began to affect the range and type of questions in the Schools’ Census. The two main changes of note are that the ethnicity of pupils began to be recorded from 1996, and permanent exclusions became a feature of the census. Also of interest (from 1996 onwards): the data for all school types began to be arranged within a single dataset. NDAD users may now conduct searches and run queries across all school types.

One new dataset (2006 snapshot, Ref: CRDA/26/DS/6) is now available from the Oil and Gas Directorate, North Sea Geographical Information System series (CRDA/26).

One new dataset (EduBase 2006 snapshot) is available from the Register of Educational Establishments series (CRDA/47).

A new dataset is available in the ‘Department of Culture, Media and Sport: National Lottery Awards Database’ series (CRDA/39): the 2006 snapshot.

A new record series ‘Millennium Commission: Awards Scheme Database (AMIS)’ (CRDA/65) is now available. The series contains one dataset: Final database (2004)

A new record series ‘Millennium Commission: Grants Database (PROFESA)’ (CRDA/66) is now available. The series contains one dataset: PROFESA 2006

The December 2008 issue of Datasets News, the newsletter for users of NDAD, is now available. It’s packed with fascinating articles to help you get the most out of the service. Download the latest newsletter.

Following the recent information review, we are pleased to announce that full access to open datasets has been restored. Datasets can be viewed, queried and downloaded directly online. Downloads up to 10MB are free of charge.

To view the datasets, use the Browse NDAD button on the homepage, or the Browse link in the NDAD menu near the top-right of every page.

Please send your suggestions about the current service, what you like, what could be improved and how to NDADContractManager@nationalarchives.gov.uk. Thank you.

ULCC have been advised by the London Metropolitan Network that they shall be performing maintenance on their network links on Tuesday 13th October between 07:00 and 09:00 BST that is likely to cause several brief network interruptions. This may result in NDAD becoming unavailable for several periods of a couple of minutes each.

Due to ULCC moving offices, we need to move the NDAD database cluster management software to a different server. Theoretically this can be done without causing any disruption to the service, but as this is the first time we have performed this operation and it’s a complicated procedure, as a precaution we are advising that downtime is possible.

The move will take place on Thursday 24th September between 07:00 and 09:00 BST. Interruptions to service, if they happen, may occur at any time during the session, but should last for no more than five minutes.

A problem has arisen with part of the network infrastructure hardware used by NDAD. Because this could potentially affect the resilience of the service (if other hardware issues arose at the same time), ULCC has scheduled an expedited maintenance session to fix this problem. This will take place next Tuesday 8th September between 07:00 and 08:00 BST. Access to NDAD will be interrupted during this period while the hardware is restarted, but this should take no more than 5 minutes.