DDI Drives Roper@Cornell Improvements

The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research is the oldest social science archive, and the world's largest archive devoted exclusively to public opinion survey research data. Roper@Cornell holds over 23,000 datasets and offers iPOLL, a question bank with over 700,000 entries. After the Center moved to Cornell University in late 2015, a major rebuild of the archival structure and data model was undertaken to map the archive's metadata to DDI standards.

In this presentation, we will describe how we are using more comprehensive, normalized, and granular DDI metadata to drive improvements at Roper@Cornell. We will also explain and define how our efforts align the Center with the American Association of Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) Transparency Initiative. Our presentation will include a particular emphasis on historical data-polling data from the 1930s-1960s - and how the Roper Center is providing new tools, facilitating new analysis, and helping researchers develop better understanding of these important collections. We will show how Roper is using DDI to describe early and transitional periods of poll sampling, and how that effort can inform description of new polling methods.