The Data Documentation Initiative effort began in 1995, setting the bases for what in 2022 has become a standard that has numerous products (DDI Codebook, DDI Lifecycle, Controlled vocabularies etc.). But no standard can exist without tools, and the purpose of this session is to discuss the future of DDI-Codebook supporting tools. 

One of the data platforms that supported DDI Codebook is Nesstar, developed and maintained by the former Norwegian Center for Research Data (NSD), now Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Research and Education (SIKT). Nesstar offers both a metadata editor and a server showcasing data and metadata. Institutions like the Center for Socio-Political data (CDSP), the Slovenian Social Science Data Archives (ADP) and SIKT have been using it for many years, both for editing and publishing data. One of the main features of the Nesstar Server, much appreciated by its user community, was the data discovery and data analysis feature. In parallel, the Nesstar editor continues to be one of the most performant software allowing metadata editing in DDI Codebook. 

Unfortunately, as it is no longer supported, more and more archives are moving away from Nesstar. The needs for a more powerful variable search engine, implementation of persistent identifiers and more FAIR metadata and data are requirements archives need to fulfill in their new data editing, data discovery and data access workflows. In addition, there is an increasing need for DDI-C tools allowing variable-level metadata editing.

In this talk, we will discuss the current workflows of ADP, CDSP and SIKT and ideas for moving forward together with the community.