Social Science Metadata
No single established standard.
Many local "dialects" of the most common standard.
Different data archives have adapted their metadata to fit different storage and retrieval systems.
= low level of standardization across archives.
DDI: Data Documentation Initiative established in 1995 to create a universally supported metadata standard for the social science community.
NESSTAR is using the XML-version of the DDI-standard as the fundamental structure of its metadata system.
Developed a set of metadata converters to ease translation of existing metadata.