Best Practices Documents: Are They Really Necessary?

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.