Social scientists funded through the National Climate Change and Wildlife Science Center (NCCWSC) and the Climate Science Centers (CSCs) have an obligation to provide access to their climate science related research data. We suspect, as with other data types, that tools for creating and editing social science metadata specific to the climate science domain and linking the metadata to the actual data either do not exist or are non-intuitive for scientists. Through our research we sought to verify whether any definitive metadata tool for social scientists working in the climate science domain exists. We also sought to determine whether a commonly agreed upon social science metadata standard exists. We suspect that the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) may be the most appropriate standard. Using a goal-directed design (GDD) approach, we sought to: (1) identify the best practices and approaches (BP&A) used in the social science data management and curation community to meet these intrinsic and process-oriented challenges and create a document that addresses practices based upon roles, i.e., researcher and data steward; (2) measure user behaviors and needs necessary to identify what support services or data collection or processing tools need to be deployed or developed in order to support social science data sharing; and (3) formalize the models as requirements, which will fit into the framework for sharing data established by the NCCWSC.
