Migrating a Large Collection to DDI-Lifecycle

Wolfgang Zenk-Möltgen
2020 Zenodo  
The GESIS Data Archive holds about 5000 studies, mainly social science surveys. The documentation of these studies consists of study descriptions, variable descriptions with questions and answers, and other material like methodological information. The datasets are documented by tools that use the DDI-Codebook metadata standard (formerly known as DDI 2). Since 2008, the DDI Alliance has published the DDI-Lifecycle standard (DDI 3/DDI-L), that focuses on re-usable documentation and the support
more » ... the full research data lifecycle. To use some of the many advantages that DDI-L provides, a migration of the available documentation should be conducted. The talk will focus on the benefits and challenges of such a migration project, and will show possible options during that process. The use of the recently published DDI version 2.5 will be considered because it aims at making the migration to DDI-L easier. The support of software for the format conversion and for the necessary re-arrangement of documentation parts will be investigated. The consequences of such a migration project for the future maintenance of the data and documentation will be shown.
doi:10.5281/zenodo.3781407 fatcat:6ejqp65inbfkjkk7ev3p6jiaz4