[6] Colectica was originally funded in part by the NIH National Institute on Aging to explore automatic documentation of computer assisted surveys.

The grant also partially funded the creation of a questionnaire specification content area in the Data Documentation Initiative's DDI Lifecycle metadata standard.

The functionality of these tools, originally named SurveyViz, is now bundled with the Colectica Designer and based on the DDI standard.

The NIH funds many long-running longitudinal studies that have collected vast amounts of data, which due to their design require detailed documentation and organization.

In 2011, the NIH National Institute on Aging provided further funding to add longitudinal data management functionality to Colectica[8][9] to enable documenting the complex study designs.