While the DDI-Lifecycle is an excellent standard for research, statistical and social science metadata, it is still relatively unknown outside of a small community of agencies – and even within those agencies it is still relatively obscure. What the problem is, isn’t a lack of experience working with the standard, its a lack of communication of this experience, especially to new users.

Communicating to new users, especially non-technical ones, requires being able to think like a novice. This means being able to present information in a way that is accessible and engaging. Accessible so a user isn’t overwhelmed with information and engaging so they have an incentive to learn.

Which brings us back to the problem in the DDI community – being inundated with experts, it is very difficult to get into the mindset of new users. While its true that “DDI can be used to describe the entirety of a social science survey”, ” the entirety of a social science survey” is quite a lot of metadata with no easy entry point. To solve this we need to make the standard more accessible – by providing easy to follow starting points for the standard – and engaging – by displaying this information in a clear and understandable way.

So, to this end, I have produced what will hopefully be the first in a number of posters and handouts to help promote DDI available in the posters section or you can click on the image below to get a fullsize copy of the DDI visualisations poster from IASSIST 2012. But if you have any ideas for for other possible ways to present DDI in an accessible and easy to illustrate way, feel free to add a comment below.

DDI Poster Thumbnail