Creating DDI-Lifecycle Documentation for Longitudinal Data at ICPSR

In line with ICPSR’s commitment to adopt DDI Lifecycle to document some of its longitudinal studies, we have recently embarked on a new project that involves creating DDI 3.2 metadata for one of our most popular collections at the National Social Life, Health and Aging Project (NSHAP), which is managed and distributed by our National Archive of Computerized Data on Aging (NACDA). We will briefly introduce this collection and elaborate on the steps taken to move its metadata to DDI Lifecycle using Colectica Designer and make it publicly available on the Colectica Portal. We plan to focus on any specific challenges encountered during this process and the practical solutions applied to overcome them. We also intend to showcase some of the benefits of using DDI-L, such as the improved comparability and usability of the data.