Metadata across the Public Use - Restricted Access Divide

Warren A. Brown, Cornell University

Public-use micro-datasets as a cornerstone of empirical research in the social sciences is coming to an end. Scholars acquire authorized restricted access to confidential identifiable data and perform their analyses in secure environments. Scientific scrutiny is hampered because the researcher cannot implement a data-management plan that permits sharing these restricted-access data with other scholars. This project bridges the transition to restricted-access data and offer the scholar, the scientific community, and the custodial agency a feasible path to long-term data preservation. The NSF/Census Research Network-Cornell node is building a Comprehensive Extensible Data Documentation and Access Repository (CED²AR) designed to improve the documentation and discoverability of both public and restricted data from the federal statistical system. The CED²AR is based upon leading metadata standards such as the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) and Statistical Data and Metadata eXchange (SDMX) and will be flexibly designed to ingest documentation from a variety of source files.