Full Paper

The Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) began in 1995 with a small international group coming together with a focus on social science metadata. The group moved quickly to develop a first specification, around which a community of practice emerged. That community, along with the DDI specification itself, has evolved over the last two decades to reflect developments in the social sciences, technological advances, and innovation in research practice. This paper, part of an IASSIST Quarterly volume honoring the legacy of Sue A.

This paper is part of an IASSIST Quarterly volume honoring Sue A. Dodd. The paper describes the context, motivation, and requirements behind the design and development of the first version of the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) metadata community specification, with an emphasis upon the process of creating the initial element set for the “study level” of DDI version 1. We also offer a framework for understanding the infrastructural changes that contributed to the establishment of the DDI.

This paper is part of an IASSIST Quarterly volume to honor the legacy of Sue A. Dodd. Sue identified the vacuum of library catalogue description for the new and growing area of machine-readable data (Dodd, 1979), and provided guidance for using a standard bibliographic format to fill this vacuum (Dodd, 1982). In following years she continued to communicate, discuss and elaborate upon the guidance.

This paper presents the challenges faced by DDI in incorporating a new set of information – the description of data management plans – into the existing set of DDI information, suggesting some current points of overlap, and setting the stage for a future discussion regarding how data management planning might fit into the overall model of the data production lifecycle, and how it can address the wide variety of models used internationally to describe data management plans.