New Study and New Features: A Colectica Portal for the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS)

This presentation will introduce the latest longitudinal study to use DDI Lifecycle and Colectica software. The Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) is a long-term study of a random sample of 10,317 men and women who graduated from the Wisconsin stat (U.S.) high schools in 1957. Since then, there have been six rounds of survey data collected from the original respondents and the sample has been expanded to include parents, siblings, and spouses of the graduates. The current round of data collection focuses on Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias (ADRD) by capturing detailed measures of cognitive change and collecting blood-based biomarkers of Alzheimer’s Disease. After first experimenting with DDI using the Nesstar suite of products, WLS began producing online codebooks in 2004 using Perl scripts to assemble DDI Codebook XML from a wide array of input sources. A successful National Institute on Aging (NIA) grant in 2023 included funding to migrate WLS codebooks to DDI Lifecycle and create a Colectica Portal much like other longitudinal studies (MIDUS, NHATS, etc.) have done. The WLS Portal (https://wls.portal.ssc.wisc.edu/) went live in June, 2024 and this presentation will provide a metadata administrator’s perspective on the upgrade process, with a focus on two themes: •Comparing and contrasting the electronic metadata before and after the upgrade, highlighting the pros and cons of using scripts vs. tools , and describing new features developed by Colectica software. •Describe how updating the metadata production pipelines prompted a careful review of the actual microdata and documentation, leading to improvements in variable representations and streamlining how metadata are assembled . The new Portal also presents the potential for cross-study harmonization using Lifecycle and Colectica; possible integration with NACDA’s cross-series comparisons project will be reviewed.