Best Practices Documents: Are They Really Necessary?

In Ontario, there is a movement afoot to mark up surveys in DDI and put them in an interface that allows them to be shared with other universities. A noble exercise, indeed! Our project, (Ontario Data Documentation, Extraction Service and Infrastructure Initiative) provides university researchers with unprecedented access to a significant number of datasets in a web-based data extraction system. Access to the data with its accompanying standardized metadata is key to our project. However, the staff marking up these surveys do not necessarily think alike, so the formats used in marking up the surveys can and do vary across institutions. And this is taking place in only one province so this begs the question of what the formatting looks like when the marking up is done nationally. In this presentation, we will discuss the five Ws of a Best Practices Document: why we need one; when it happened; where it was put together; what the process was; and who will benefit from it.