Doing More with Metadata: Documenting Variable Comparability using DDI-Lifecycle (Metadata & Preservation “Deep Dive” Webinar series for ICPSR staff)

Abstract

This presentation was part of a 2021-2022 ICPSR Metadata & Preservation unit "Deep Dive" Webinar series for ICPSR staff. The presentation abstract:

DDI-Lifecycle is a newer development line of the DDI metadata suite of products, featuring added support for grouping items, information reuse, and documenting variable comparability across studies or series of studies.

We will highlight some of the major differences between DDI-Codebook and DDI-Lifecycle and will describe the latter’s approach in documenting variable comparability with real-life examples from three projects completed for the NACDA archive, that resulted in cross-wave and cross-series concordances.. We will include a detailed demo of the steps involved in creating DDI-Lifecycle metadata and a cross-wave concordance for a longitudinal study.

In this session we will try to address some of these questions:

-Why is DDI-Lifecycle relevant for ICPSR? -Does adopting DDI-Lifecycle mean that we would have to give up using DDI-Codebook and retrofit all of our existing DDI? -Do we need to think about supporting DDI-Lifecycle internally or do we increase support for the commercial Colectica suite?