The Metropolitan Travel Survey Archive: A Case Study in Archiving

Abstract

This paper summarizes research on standards for archiving travel survey data. It then describes some of the efforts at organizing data and developing metadata. The development of metadata standards used for documenting datasets using DDI (Data Documentation Initiative) for DTD (Document Type Definitions) is described. A case, applying these approaches to a US Metropolitan Travel Survey Archive is presented. The Metropolitan Travel Survey Archive, housed at the University of Minnesota, now contains over 60 surveys from almost 30 metropolitan areas. The paper concludes with some recommendations for archiving data.