The Digital Research Alliance of Canada has recently published two new guides, developed by the Canadian Research Data Management (RDM) community, for users of the Dataverse platform to facilitate best practices in metadata creation and provide suggestions for research data curation: the Dataverse Metadata Best Practices Guide version 3, and the Dataverse Curation Guide.
Scholars Portal Dataverse is a data repository provided by Scholars Portal on behalf of participating Canadian university libraries. The platform is supported by data experts within the library community and beyond, and enables collaborative data management. Researchers can use Dataverse to find, explore, visualize, deposit, and publish their data. Users can create robust metadata, track changes across versions of their datasets, mint Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), and make data open or restricted.
The new version of the Dataverse Metadata Best Practices Guide provides clear, consistent, detailed guidance, definitions, and examples of metadata fields, as well as an updated introduction and revised metadata tables. The guide also now includes guidance for all Dataverse metadata blocks: Citation metadata, Geospatial metadata, Social Sciences and Humanities metadata, Life Sciences metadata, Astronomy and Astrophysics metadata, and Journal metadata.
The Dataverse Curation Guide was developed to address the gap between the facility to house curated data and the institutional capacity to curate data for Dataverse repositories. It provides step-by-step instructions for curating new datasets deposited in Dataverse. It acknowledges that there is no “one-size-fits-all” model to data curation and has been developed with flexibility in mind. The guide can be used by new or experienced curators in institutions of all sizes, and has built-in flexibility to support different levels of curation per institution based on their own strategic priorities, policies, and procedures.
These guides were produced by the Digital Research Alliance of Canada's RDM working groups (formerly Portage), which are comprised of members of the Canadian RDM community and Alliance staff. For more information on these guides, please contact the group co-chairs:
Dataverse Metadata Working Group
- Alexandra Cooper, Queen’s University, coopera@queensu.ca
- Mark Goodwin, University of British Columbia, mark.goodwin@ubc.ca
Dataverse Curation Guide Working Group
- Alexandra Cooper, Queen’s University, coopera@queensu.ca
- Michael Steeleworthy, Wilfrid Laurier University, msteeleworthy@wlu.ca