Using Colectica to document socio-political surveys in DDI-Lifecycle: feedback and benefits

With the Open Science movement, the patterns of data sharing are evolving. In this context, the French Center for socio-political data has launched in 2020 an experimental project that aims to build a question bank using DDI-Lifecycle and Colectica - Designer, Repository and Portal. Beyond the final goal to be compliant with the CESSDA repositories standards, so that data and metadata may be harvested in the European Question Bank, this new tool is implemented for two additional purposes. On the one hand, to make data more discoverable and findable at variable level. On the other hand, to implement an internal less time-consuming documentation protocol by defining a metadata model at the variable level – a reference document for data managers to check for paradigms of organized data. This presentation outlines the main steps of the process of implementation of DDI-Lifecycle using the Colectica softwares package, including challenges met to build the question bank. More broadly, it gives feedback about the entry cost of the shift from DDI-Codebook to DDI-Lifecycle, as well as the process of enhancing metadata documentation quality, especially harmonization of items and work on granularity at the variable level. A recorded version of the whole session can be found there: https://youtu.be/IXPBoyPqoR