Creating Rich, Structured Metadata: Lessons Learned in the Metadata Portal Project

With support from the National Science Foundation, two long-running social science studies – the American National Election Study and the General Social Survey – partnered with the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) and NORC at the University of Chicago to improve their metadata and build demonstration tools to illustrate the value of structured, machine-actionable metadata. The partnership also involved evaluating the studies’ data collection workflows to determine where in the data life cycle metadata could be captured at source to avoid metadata loss and costly procedures to recreate the metadata later. This article reports on the experience and knowledge gained over the course of the project and also includes recommendations for others undertaking similar work.