DDI as Content for Registries

The authors believe that it is currently premature to recommend a ‘best practice’ for interacting effectively with registries. Instead, this document defines registries and provides a justification for using them. It begins by giving relevant definitions and discussing the general business case and then goes on to describe from a high-level perspective the use of registries that allow researchers to access material. It concludes by describing examples of researcher use cases.  

Researchers need to discover information that they can use to answer their research questions. To meet this requirement, data disseminators need to improve the discovery/visibility of their data and metadata. The exposure of DDI metadata can be enhanced through DDI registries that allow, for example, federated searching, as well as the reuse of information from one project to another to enhance comparison and minimize duplication of effort.