DDI Products for a Variety of Data Needs

This presentation provides a broad overview of the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) metadata standard. DDI offers a suite of products that address the evolving needs of data producers, users, and archivists.

Two of DDI’s most popular standards are DDI-Codebook and DDI-Lifecycle. Codebook is designed for structured, descriptive documentation of the content, meaning, provenance, and access for a single dataset, down to the variable level. Lifecycle is more comprehensive, covering a range of elements across data’s full lifecycle, and as such is well suited for documenting longitudinal, linked, and other complex datasets. We will provide a broad overview of how these standards are structured and discuss real-life examples of their application. We also plan to engage the audience to gather feedback about their familiarity with DDI.