An Archive's Perspective on DDI 3

Ongoing data series tend to be complex in terms of management, processing, and analysis. A team in Europe made an exploration and evaluation of DDI 3 to determine its suitability for marking up and managing crossnational comparative surveys like the International Social Survey Programme data. Their findings may help others interested in organizing survey series using the DDI‘s Group and Resource Package mechanisms.  This paper describes the DDI 3 evaluation process at the Finnish Social Science Data Archive (FSD), and the issues that came up during this work. Several reasons led FSD to investigate moving from DDI 2.1 towards DDI 3: for example, multilinguality issues and the need to avoid repeating information when documenting series of studies, as well as the need to better manage the growing amount of metadata. The ISSP 2006 Finnish data was chosen as the use case. A subset of these data was documented in DDI 3.1. This project is also a component of the CESSDA PPP work. CESSDA PPP stands for the Preparatory Phase Project for a Major Upgrade of the Council of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA) Research Infrastructure. The aim of the project is to plan the future development of the CESSDA RI and focus on tackling and resolving a number of strategic, financial, and legal issues in order to ensure that European social science and humanities researchers have access to, and gain support for, the data resources they require to conduct research of the highest quality, irrespective of the location of either researcher or data within the European Research Area. For further information please see http://www.cessda.org/project/