Getting Better All the Time: Metadata Enhancements in the ICPSR Catalog

ICPSR is enhancing our metadata – the information we provide about each study, like its title, time period, and subject – to make our data easier to find, use, and share. These improvements have been designed as part of ICPSR’s Research Data Ecosystem (RDE) platform, supported by the National Science Foundation, and are now being introduced to some live ICPSR data collections.

Enhancements include:

• addition of persistent identifiers (PIDs) for people and organizations, to support connections across systems;
• improved controlled vocabularies to search by data characteristics such as format and collection method – like survey, panel, or GIS data;
• new required fields to clearly indicate where, when, and what each data collection is about;
• better handling of geographic coverage and new fields that help users find data from small towns to entire continents, including nationally representative data.

In this presentation, ICPSR’s metadata team will show these enhancements, which are already live in some ICPSR data collections. We’ll also share practical tips for attendees who deposit data with ICPSR or support people who do – ideas to help depositors prepare to make the best use of these new fields as they roll out to more collections within ICPSR.

The slides from the presentation are available at https://myumi.ch/4mR2M

This webinar is part of the 2026 ICPSR Data Fair @ Love Data Week. For more information, please visit myumi.ch/ICPSRLoveDataWeek.