Lay All Your Love on Me(tadata): A New API for Discovering and Downloading ICPSR Metadata

ICPSR maintains a collection of 60+ years of curated, richly described research data available for reuse by social science researchers at all levels of experience. A key challenge to disseminating this data is making it findable – helping users discover our data resources and making them aware of the ways in which ICPSR data can support their research needs. To address this challenge, ICPSR created a metadata export API (Application Programming Interface) that enables individuals and institutions to programmatically retrieve study-level metadata about ICPSR studies in multiple standards-based formats. The API supports reuse of ICPSR metadata in local catalogs, discovery systems, research workflows, and downstream applications. It extends and enriches ICPSR’s reach while increasing the FAIRness (findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability) of its data collections. In this presentation, members of ICPSR’s metadata team will demonstrate the new metadata export API and its benefits, including how to query it to find studies that meet specific research needs, what information is returned in the results, and how these exports improve upon ICPSR’s previous metadata distribution offerings. If you're interested in incorporating ICPSR data into another discovery platform, this session will show you how to get started.