Application for MacOS for getting dataset metadata as CSV files

[Julian Gautier]

Hi everyone,

I made a desktop application for MacOS that puts the metadata of multiple datasets, either datasets from Dataverse collections or from search results, into CSV files. It's at https://github.com/jggautier/dataverse-scripts. I made it for a few reasons, the most important to me being:

• To help generate and answer questions about what metadata people need and what people need to do with it. Having these questions and answers can help if the community is one day able to work on adding this kind of feature to the Dataverse software itself

• To help anyone else interested and able to improve the Dataverse software by using analyses of metadata to learn how well the Dataverse software helps researchers and curators describe datasets and learn how some of its features are and aren't used

Please feel free to email me about it, especially if you can share how you use it or would like to use it.

Reporting bugs would be helpful, too. Just be aware that the application is missing some basic features to prevent and warn about errors, like when Dataverse installation websites are down, when their APIs aren't working, if you mistype Dataverse collection URLs or if you type into a field something else unexpected. I won't be rushing to improve the lack of error messaging since my goal isn't really to improve and maintain this application for the long term.

Lastly, earlier this month I used the same code and Dataverse APIs to update my dataset at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/DCDKZQ, which now contains the dataset metadata of 66 of the 78 installations on the Dataverse installation map. Please consider using the data in that dataset if you need the metadata of all datasets in one or more Dataverse installations and if you don't mind that the metadata isn't up to date.

Thanks!
Julian