CESSDA's Metadata Management (CMM) project has released its first report today, entitled CESSDA Service Providers’ Metadata Practices.

This report is the first deliverable of the CMM project, summarising the status of the use of metadata standards and controlled vocabularies within CESSDA Service Providers. It also describes previous work and existing solutions that will serve as a basis for upcoming work, as well as brings to light the metadata needs of the CESSDA collaboration from the perspective of the CMM project.

The CMM project is part of the CESSDA Work Plan 2015, having started in November 2015 and running until April 2017, led by the FSD and including seven additional partners within CESSDA (ADP, CASD, DDA, GESIS, NSD, SND, and UKDS).

The objective of the CMM project is to develop a standardised metadata design and practice for CESSDA. The outcome will be a Metadata Standards Portfolio that will support resource discovery and question banks. The Portfolio will be compliant with the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) international standard for describing statistical and social science data and will include a core metadata model and controlled vocabularies for relevant metadata fields.

It goes without saying that without good metadata, the data assets held by the CESSDA Service Providers would be meaningless characters. Metadata are the basis for CESSDA’s core services, such as the Product and Service Catalogue. The Catalogue can only be as good as the metadata behind it - if the metadata are poor, the Catalogue cannot make them better; without adequate and standardised metadata, the Catalogue cannot function as intended.

The next steps involve a project working meeting taking place during the EDDI16 event in Cologne in December, as well as a Portfolio published in April 2017 (including the core metadata model and controlled vocabularies) which CESSDA Service Providers will have commented on earlier in the year, as well as an impact analysis published in April 2017.

Read the full report, CESSDA Service Providers' Metadata Practices, here.

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