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DDI AND EXPERIENCES AT ICPSR

DDI AND EXPERIENCES AT ICPSR. Prepared for Expert Seminar Finnish Social Science Data Archive Tampere, Finland September 1-2, 2000. Practical Effects of DDI Work. Proposal to enhance user support on ICPSR Website and Other ‘Infrastructural’ Improvements

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DDI AND EXPERIENCES AT ICPSR

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  1. DDI AND EXPERIENCES AT ICPSR Prepared forExpert Seminar Finnish Social Science Data Archive Tampere, Finland September 1-2, 2000

  2. Practical Effects of DDI Work • Proposal to enhance user support on ICPSR Website and Other ‘Infrastructural’ Improvements • Funding received from U.S. National Science Foundation for period from September, 1999 through August, 2002

  3. Practical Effects of DDI Work • Infrastructure Project Goals: • Improve the tools on the ICPSR website for the discovery of data • preparation of new and extended study-level metadata using DDI standards • new Boolean search facility allowing users to construct simple to complex logical relationships among the attributes of each study description • new keyword index • variable-level searches for portion of the holdings

  4. Practical Effects of DDI Work • Substantially extend an existing database of bibliographic references to publications • Train an existing network of end-user campus support representatives to assist with hard-to-use datasets • series of workshops

  5. Practical Effects of DDI Work • Integrate major data resources outside ICPSR fully into the searchable ICPSR metadata databases • extension of existing ‘virtual’ data archive through fully-integrated hyperlinks

  6. Practical Effects of DDI Work • Improvements in ICPSR Website including: • comprehensive site index • “shopping cart” facility in which users can batch data to be downloaded • context-sensitive help screens • development supported by internal resources

  7. Practical Effects of DDI Work • Conversion of metadata to DDI • Mapping between DDI elements and categories included in ICPSR’s metadata records (study descriptions) • Goal: develop a conversion routine to tag all of the study descriptions with the appropriate XML tags • Longer-term goal: incorporate this process into the initial creation of study descriptions

  8. Enhancement of Metadata: Bibliographic Citations • Systematically investigate full-text databases and do Internet searches • Reference other sources, e.g., Eurobarometer list of publications • Search older publications and government study reports • Search for publications by ICPSR Principal Investigators/contact them directly

  9. Enhancement of Metadata: Bibliographic Citations • Include new citations in ‘related publications’ field of study and series descriptions • Develop permanent contacts with publishers, professional associations to gather new citations more routinely than has been done in the past

  10. Enhancement of Metadata: Use of Thesaurus • General applicability of using thesauri to index ICPSR holdings • Advantages and disadvantages of using the HASSET thesaurus developed by the Data Archive at the University of Essex • Importance of study descriptions in creating a good index

  11. Enhancement of Metadata: Study Descriptions • Standardization: • Approx. 1/4th of 5000+ descriptions written prior to 1986 and contain a limited number of fields • A labor-intensive task: reviewing original records • Additional benefit: checking the data as well

  12. Future DDI Work Proposal (unfunded as yet) for DDI-II: • extend use to more complex aggregate and hierarchical datasets and ‘families’ of data sets • fuller documentation of electronic surveys • better software to markup codebooks

  13. Future DDI Work • facilitate preparation of ‘questionnaires’ in CATI/CAPI surveys • achieve interoperability with object-oriented databases of metadata • technical workshop for data producers

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