Using R at the Romanian Data Archive

This presentation introduces the use of R at the Romanian Social Data Archive to support structured documentation of social science datasets using the DDI Codebook standard. It outlines requirements for high-quality (meta)data packages, including well-labeled variables and values, cleaned datasets, and rich study-level descriptions such as objectives, universe, sampling, and fieldwork details. The talk contrasts top-down and bottom-up strategies for generating DDI-compliant XML, illustrating how XML element hierarchies map to R list structures. It then presents the R package DDIwR, which handles DDI Codebook 2.6, provides fine-grained control over XML output, robust handling of categories and missing values, and import/export across major statistical packages. The overall aim is to move toward an open source, cross-platform toolchain that enables researchers, archivists, and data producers to fully populate DDI metadata from existing datasets and databases.