Electronic Data Documentation: Complementary SGML and Image Capture Approaches

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The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) archives the world's largest collection of quantitative data for social and behavioral science research and teaching. Complete, well-structured documentation is essential to effective use of these data; today, that documentation must be electronic and must be search-able on the World Wide Web. This award will assist ICPSR to complete a major program of research and development that is intended to produce the next generation of electronic documentation of social and behavioral science data. Employing the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), ICPSR is developing a new methodology for producing structured documentation. This Data Documentation Initiative involves documentation experts from data archives around the world, representatives of U.S. statistical agencies, and experts in SGML. During the term of this award, ICPSR will beta-test this methodology at several locations, develop guidelines and reference manuals, and integrate the SGML methodology with existing methodologies. The product of this effort will be a publicly-available Document Type Definition that may be widely adopted by social science researchers and statistical agencies around the world. It will materially assist researchers in preparing their data for public release and will improve the standard of archived data sets. This award will, in addition, aid ICPSR in producing the electronic text that underlies structured documentation. As much of ICPSR's archive is currently documented solely by paper records, ICPSR is investing considerable resources in the preparation of electronic documentation, to which NSF is contributing an increment in order to accelerate the conversation of documentation from paper to electronic forms.