Help improve the Dataverse software’s metadata fields

[Julian Gautier]

Hi everyone!

We’ve been working on improvements to the Dataverse software’s metadata fields and need your help.

Guided by the discussions that you and others in the community have had in recent years, we’ve started with changes to the field labels, tooltips and watermarks in the “Citation” metadata block that ships with the software. They are mostly grammar and consistency changes and in some cases we’ve tried to clarify the meanings of fields and provide guidance about how they should be used.

By Wednesday, December 8, 2021, could you review the changes in the Google spreadsheet and create comments in the spreadsheet with your thoughts and questions? In some cases it might be helpful to see the fields in the user interface. It might be easiest to see them by creating and editing a dataset in the Demo Dataverse test repository.

Feel free to encourage others in your groups to do the same.

To encourage involvement from the larger community, we're also messaging the Dataverse Community Slack’s ig-metadata channel and several groups in the community directly. Let us know if there are other people or groups we should reach out to.

Best regards,

The Dataverse software team at IQSS

[Steven McEachern]

Hi Julian,

I've started adding comments into the spreadsheet, and will comment further here next week.

In the short term, can I suggest taking a look at the CESSDA custom metadata block discussion from last year, which also covers some related ground on how DV fields are being used.

https://groups.google.com/g/dataverse-community/c/kben6-8jRxE

Cheers,

Steve

[Julian Gautier]

Thanks Steve and thanks everyone else who's been looking at and discussing the changes in the spreadsheet!

[Julian Gautier]

Hi everyone,

Thanks for all of the feedback and discussion about the changes to the metadata field labels, tooltips and watermarks. Over the past few months we've been very careful to curate all of the feedback and make as many changes as we could based on them. We'd like to share those changes as they would appear in the Dataverse software's user interface, so a test server with the changes has been created at http://ec2-3-83-104-121.compute-1.amazonaws.com.

If you're interested, please check out the changes to the test server's "Citation" metadata fields and like last time provide feedback on the changes -- either by emailing me, posting in this thread, or commenting on the Google spreadsheet -- by the end of this Friday, February 11.

Please keep in mind that: 

• The scope of the changes are limited to largely grammatical and consistency improvements of the field labels, tooltips and watermarks of the metadata fields in the Dataverse software's Citation metadatablock.

• The changes don't address all of the feedback we received, either because the feedback involves topics that need more research and community discussion or because the feedback involves improvements beyond the field labels, tooltips and watermarks (such as improved support for controlled vocabularies)

• We look forward, in other efforts, to use the feedback that these changes do not address to continue improving the metadata fields.

Thanks!

Julian