The matter of meta in research data management: Introducing the CESSDA Metadata Office Project

Accompanying the growing importance of research data management, the provision and maintenance of metadata – understood as data about (research) data – have obtained a key role in contextualizing, understanding, and preserving research data. Acknowledging the importance of metadata in the social sciences, the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives started the Metadata Office project in 2019. This project report presents the various activities of the Metadata Office (MDO). Metadata models, schema, controlled vocabularies and thesauri are covered, including the MDO’s collaboration with the DDI Alliance on multilingual translations of DDI vocabularies for CESSDA Service Providers. The report also summarizes the communication, training and advice provided by MDO, including DDI use across CESSDA, illustrates the impact of the project for the social science and research data management community, and offers an outline regarding future plans of the project.