Data Services: Data Documentation & Description

This guide provides information on managing data and obtaining secondary data for research.

Data Documentation & Description

Research data must be thoroughly described so you or someone else in the future can decipher what they are. Metadata does this for you. Metadata is descriptive information about a project, the experiments, the equipment used, the researchers, and the data themselves. It aids in long term access to and comprehension of the data from a project. For example, if someone uses the data, metadata will help them understand what the project was all about, how the data were obtained, who collected them, and what they mean.

Metadata Standards

The following are some examples of metadata standards that can be used to describe your data.