Researcher documentation/READMEs
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paul....@ubc.ca
Dec 5, 2025, 1:55:38 PM (13 days ago) Dec 5
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Hi Dataverse community,
I'm not sure if *all* of us have the same problem, but here at UBC it's sometimes challenging to get researchers to provide a basic text file to go with any data deposits. Because researchers already have to interact with Dataverse to produce at least minimal metadata, UBC decided to make a tiny utility so that you can generate a basic README from a data deposit.
Depending on the file(s) deposited, it may also churn through those and produce some summary stats, as for SPSS, Stata, etc.
Obviously this is not a complete subsititute for documentation, but it allows curators to produce a reasonably formatted document which they can then send back to depositors and say, "Hey, can you fill this out with a little more detail?" More importantly, because researchers *must* fill out fields when depositing data, you are at least assured of receiving *some* metadata, and if a researcher only has to fill out one thing there's a higher chance of success. Hopefully.
The utility is available as part of the dataverse_utils suite (https://pypi.org/project/dataverse-utils/), and has the unremarkable name of `dv_readme_creator` (https://ubc-library-rc.github.io/dataverse_utils/scripts/#dv_readme_creator)
To give you an idea of what it looks like, here's sample of the Markdown it produces from this study in Borealis:https://borealisdata.ca/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.5683/SP3/WSZ1W5
This one had a README already but I'm sure you get the idea. It also makes PDFs instead of plain text, although that may have less utility. But it *is* prettier.
Anyway, it's there if you need it or want it.
Paul Lesack
University of British Columbia Library
I'm not sure if *all* of us have the same problem, but here at UBC it's sometimes challenging to get researchers to provide a basic text file to go with any data deposits. Because researchers already have to interact with Dataverse to produce at least minimal metadata, UBC decided to make a tiny utility so that you can generate a basic README from a data deposit.
Depending on the file(s) deposited, it may also churn through those and produce some summary stats, as for SPSS, Stata, etc.
Obviously this is not a complete subsititute for documentation, but it allows curators to produce a reasonably formatted document which they can then send back to depositors and say, "Hey, can you fill this out with a little more detail?" More importantly, because researchers *must* fill out fields when depositing data, you are at least assured of receiving *some* metadata, and if a researcher only has to fill out one thing there's a higher chance of success. Hopefully.
The utility is available as part of the dataverse_utils suite (https://pypi.org/project/dataverse-utils/), and has the unremarkable name of `dv_readme_creator` (https://ubc-library-rc.github.io/dataverse_utils/scripts/#dv_readme_creator)
To give you an idea of what it looks like, here's sample of the Markdown it produces from this study in Borealis:https://borealisdata.ca/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.5683/SP3/WSZ1W5
This one had a README already but I'm sure you get the idea. It also makes PDFs instead of plain text, although that may have less utility. But it *is* prettier.
Anyway, it's there if you need it or want it.
Paul Lesack
University of British Columbia Library
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