By mhayslett | March 24, 2016
Welcome to thethird issue of Volume 39 of the IASSIST Quarterly (IQ 39:3, 2015). This special issue is guest edited by Joachim Wackerow of GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Germany and Mary Vardigan of ICPSR at the University of Michigan, USA. That sentence is a direct plagiarism from the editor’s notes of the recent double issue (IQ 38:4 & 39:1). We are very grateful for all the work Mary and Achim have carried out and are developing further in the continuing story of the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI), and for their efforts in presenting the work here in the ASSIST Quarterly.
As in the recent double issue on DDI this special issue also presents results, tools, and further initiatives. The DDI started 20 years ago and much has been accomplished. However, creative people are still refining and improving it, as well as developing new areas for the use of DDI.
Mary Vardigan and Joachim Wackerow give on the next page an overview of the content of DDI papers in this issue.
Let me then applaud the two guest editors and also the many authors who made this possible:
- Alerk Amin, RAND Cooperation, www.rand.org, USA
- Ingo Barkow, Associate Professor for Data Management at the University for Applied Sciences Eastern Switzerland (HTW Chur), Switzerland
- Stefan Kramer, American University, Washington, DC, USA
- David Schiller, Research Data Centre (FDZ) of the German Federal Employment Agency (BA) at the Institute for Employment Research (IAB)
- Jeremy Williams, Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research, USA
- Larry Hoyle, senior scientist at the Institute for Policy & Social Research at the University of Kansas, USA
- Joachim Wackerow, metadata expert at GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Germany
- William Poynter, UCL Institute of Education, London, UK
- Jennifer Spiegel, UCL Institute of Education, London, UK
- Jay Greenfield, health informatics architect working with data standards, USA
- Sam Hume, vice president of SHARE Technology and Services at CDISC, USA
- Sanda Ionescu, user support for data and documentation, ICPSR, USA
- Jeremy Iverson, co-founder and partner at Colectica, USA
- John Kunze, systems architect at the California Digital Library, USA
- Barry Radler, researcher at the University of Wisconsin Institute on Aging, USA
- Wendy Thomas, director of the Data Access Core in the Minnesota Population Center (MPC) at the University of Minnesota, USA
- Mary Vardigan, archivist at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), USA
- Stuart Weibel, worked in OCLC Research, USA
- Michael Witt, associate professor of Library Science at Purdue University, USA.
I hope you will enjoy their work in this issue, and I am certain that the contact authors will enjoy hearing from you about new potential results, tools, and initiatives.
Articles for the IASSIST Quarterly are always very welcome. They can be papers from IASSIST conferences or other conferences and workshops, from local presentations or papers especially written for the IQ. When you are preparing a presentation, give a thought to turning your one-time presentation into a lasting contribution to continuing development. As an author you are permitted ‘deep links’ where you link directly to your paper published in the IQ. Chairing a conference session with the purpose of aggregating and integrating papers for a special issue IQ is also much appreciated as the information reaches many more people than the session participants, and will be readily available on the IASSIST website at https://www.iassistdata.org.
Authors are very welcome to take a look at the instructions and layout: https://www.iassistquarterly.com/index.php/iassist/about/submissions. Authors can also contact me via e-mail: kbr@sam.sdu.dk.
Should you be interested in compiling a special issue for the IQ as guest editor(s) I will also be delighted to hear from you.
Karsten Boye Rasmussen September 2015 Editor
New Perspectives on DDI
This issue features four papers that look at leveraging the structured metadata provided by DDI in different ways. The first, “Design Considerations for DDI-Based Data Systems,” aims to help decisionmakers by highlighting the approach of using relational databases for data storage in contrast to representing DDI in its native XML format. The second paper, “DDI as a Common Format for Export and Import for Statistical Packages,” describes an experiment using the program Stat/Transfer to move datasets among five popular packages with DDI Lifecycle as an intermediary format. The paper “Protocol Development for Large-Scale Metadata Archiving Using DDI Lifecycle” discusses the use of a DDI profile to document CLOSER (Cohorts and Longitudinal Studies Enhancement Resources, www.closer.ac.uk), which brings together nine of the UK’s longitudinal cohort studies by producing a metadata discovery platform (MDP). And finally, “DDI and Enhanced Data Citation” reports on efforts in extend data citation information in DDI to include a larger set of elements and a taxonomy for the role of research contributors.
Mary Vardigan - vardigan@umich.edu Joachim Wackerow - Joachim.Wackerow@gesis.org