DDI in Agriculture? Why not!

DDI has traditionally been deemed as the international metadata standard used in social, behavioural, economic, and health sciences; geared towards describing the data produced by surveys and other methods used in these fields.  But should it be restricted to these disciplines?  Should we only be teaching graduate students and researchers in these disciplines about DDI?

During the summer of 2017, we developed a series of Research Data Management workshops teaching the basics of DDI to graduate students who are conducting research in the Ontario Agricultural College, University of Guelph.  The workshops, delivered during the Fall 2017 semester, introduced best practices for capturing research metadata and research workflows to enable essential metadata capture throughout the research project.  This presentation will discuss our approach to teaching DDI to the agricultural research community and the responses from the course participants.  We will conclude our presentation by showcasing the Agri-environmental Research Data Repository.