In this paper we address how Natural Language Processing (NLP) approaches and language technology can contribute to data services in different ways; from providing social science users with new approaches and tools to explore oral and textual data, to enhancing the search, findability and retrieval of data sources. By using linguistic approaches we are able to process data, for example using Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) and named entity recognizers (NER), extract key concepts and terms, and improve search strategies. We provide examples of how computational linguistics contribute to and facilitate the mining and analysis of oral or textual material, for example (transcribed) interviews or oral histories, and show how free open source (OS) tools can be used very easily to gain a quick overview of the key features of text, which can be further exploited as useful metadata.