Enhancing ICPSR metadata with DDI-Lifecycle

As the host institution for the DDI Alliance, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) has invested heavily in DDI since the 1990s. One example of the investment may be seen in the ICPSR Social Science Variables Database, which uses structured DDI metadata to enable ICPSR users to examine and compare variables and questions across studies or series. The majority of ICPSR's data collections currently are described using DDI Codebook (DDI 2.5), which is intended primarily to document simple survey data. ICPSR is now taking steps to document selected collections using DDI-Lifecycle (DDI 3), which is especially useful for helping data users understand the relationships among waves of longitudinal data. This presentation, given at the North American Data Documentation Initiative User Conference (NADDI) 2018 on April 6, 2018 in Washington, D.C., highlighted the process of moving to DDI-Lifecycle for one pilot collection, including benefits and lessons learned.