The World Bank have built their Microdata Library catalogs using software developed by the Microdata Library Team. These include the Microdata Library Internal Catalog, The Microdata Library External Catalog, Data Deposit Portal and Metadata Editor. All these software are built as open source projects and are made available freely to the World. In addition to the applications being used by the World Bank for the corporate Microdata Libraries they are also used to support country clients with microdata management and dissemination. The World Bank has a catalog of 7000 surveys available to staff prepared and disseminated using these tools and 75 of our client countries have now preserved and disseminate metadata, and in a growing number of cases data, using the same tools.

The Microdata Library is the World Bank's central repository for storing and dissemination survey microdata. It is one of the key supporting platforms for the Development Data Hub (DDH), endorsed by the Development Data Council (DDC). Its function is to archive, preserve and disseminate development microdata produced by the World Bank or acquired from client counties. The data are used for research purposes and inform many of the key indicators and reports produced by the Bank (e.g. the official poverty estimates).

Central to the Microdata Library are the use of international standards for microdata preservation. We use the Data Documentation Innovative standard (DDI) and Geospatial ISO19139 for the production of metadata. Proper documentation of survey data requires tools suitable for this purpose as well as a team of survey data experts to prepare and curate them.

The current set of tools\ software that make up the platform for the work of the Microdata Library and which are all part of a current approved corporate suite of tools are:

The preparation of DDI compliant metadata requires either manual creation of the metadata directly in XML or the use of custom template driven software. For the past 10 years we have been using the freeware Nesstar Publisher, developed by the Norwegian Centre for Research Data – NSD - (with financial support from the World Bank), for the creation of DDI compliant metadata for ingestion into our NADA catalogs. The NSD are discontinuing the development of the free editor. We are using this as an opportunity for us to build a new open source metadata editor using modern technologies and with greater functionality. This greater functionality included the ability to create and edit DDI (including DDI 2.5 and future DDI versions) compliant metadata as well as geospatial and even user defined metadata schemas. To facilitate greater cross compatibility between products the new metadata editor will be tightly integrated with our NADA software and our Data Deposit Application.

A first version of the Metadata editor was developed in 2017 with core features implemented to replace the existing Nesstar Publisher. The new editor requires additional development to integrate with other Microdata library applications and to be used with other third party applications and tools.