Collaborations Using Common Concepts - NACDA and CLOSER

The National Archive of Computerized Data on Aging (NACDA) and CLOSER - a UK partnership of longitudinal population studies (LPS) are collaborating with the aim of providing secondary data users with an effective way to view the research potential of age related data across LPS.

CLOSER and NACDA have implemented different metadata organization within their respective portals, CLOSER Discovery (discovery.closer.ac.uk) and NACDA Colectica portal (harmonize.icpsr.umich.edu). As two independent organizations, we intend to share information and in the future create an age-specific portal to allow comparisons across international borders, making it easier for researchers to find relevant data quickly, while supporting data harmonization, accessibility, interoperability, and reuse. Since the researcher journey broadly begins at a high level, then drills down to find the most appropriate variables, we propose to create a proof of concept at a conceptual group level.

The use of metadata standards and collaboration are essential for providing researchers with these infrastructures. Since both CLOSER Discovery and NACDA portals operate with metadata documented using the DDI metadata standard, we can leverage this in an interoperable way, without recreating efforts.

The presentation will set out how we have built a collaboration and will outline the likely approach to cross-country discoverability and best practice.