Skip to main content

The UK's largest digital collection of social sciences and population research data

Data discovery

We promote and maintain metadata standards for describing collections and data in the social sciences.

We help to develop and maintain standards for the range of data types we support, including:

  • The Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) - developing robust metadata standards for economic and social science data. Our staff sit on the DDI Technical Implementation Group and the DDI Metadata Office, and we are implementing DDI4 in our Data Service as a Platform work.
  • Implementing metadata standards in key data discovery tools such as Nesstar, OAI, ReShare and QualiBank.
  • Launching DataCite Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for all of our in-house data collection since 2012 as part of a robust approach to data citation.
  • Developing and maintaining ontologies in the social science and publishing in SKOS (HASSET and ELSST).
  • Working with Cohort and Longitudinal Studies Enhancement Resources (CLOSER) to implement DDI3.2 in the CLOSER Discovery portal.
  • Leading the development of an easy-to-use standard for complex qualitative data collections, through the use of QuDEx and TEI metadata standards
  • Actively supporting the Discovery Open Metadata Principles.