High quality data and documentation of survey datasets is needed by social scientists during the research process. The Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) uses the idea of the data life cycle across the stages of discovery and planning, initial data collection, data preparation and analysis, publication and sharing, and long-term management. The GESIS Data Archive already uses several tools to create standardized documentation on study and on dataset level to fulfil the needs of the scientific community.
Current examples for the benefits of structured metadata are the questionnaire development of the 4th wave of the European Values Study, which has been supported by the documentation of the 3rd wave, and the support for enhanced publications, which enables researchers to indicate the datasets they have used in their publications.
At the present time, the GESIS Data Archive is working on the project “STARDAT – Data Archiving Suite”. The aim of STARDAT is to develop a single web-based application that is based on DDI 3 and will contain modules for structured metadata capture, management, and dissemination. STARDAT will be integrated into the workflow between data depositors, data managers, and data users.
With the usage of structured DDI metadata, STARDAT will enable the re-use of metadata across the data lifecycle: Survey projects will benefit from better retrieval functions and from well documented previous surveys during the planning and data collection phases. Data analysis will profit from improved documented data collection on the one hand, which facilitates data preparation phases on the other. Hence data publication and data analyses will benefit from highly standardized metadata. And long-term archiving will profit from the standardized documentation of all previous phases.