Creating Guidance for Canadian Dataverse Curators: Portage Network’s Dataverse Curation Guide

Abstract

Purpose: This paper introduces the Portage Network’s Dataverse Curation Guide and the new bilingual curation framework developed to support it. Brief Description: Canadian academic institutions and national organizations have been building infrastructure, staffing, and programming to support research data management. Amidst this work, a notable gap emerged between requirements for data curation in general repositories like Dataverse and the requisite workflows and guidance materials needed by curators to meet them. In response, Portage, a national network of data experts, organized a working group to develop a Dataverse curation guide built upon the Data Curation Network’s CURATED workflow. To create a bilingual resource, the original CURATE(D) acronym was modified to CURATION—which has the same meaning in both French and English—and steps were augmented with Dataverse-specific guidance and mapped to three conceptualized levels of curation to assist curators in prioritizing curation actions. Methods: An environmental scan of relevant deposit and curation guidance materials from Canadian and international institutions identified the need for a comprehensive Dataverse Curation Guide, as most existing resources were either depositor-focused or contained only partial workflows. The resulting Guide synthesized these guidance materials into the CURATION steps and mapped actions to various theoretical levels of data repository services and levels of curation. Resources: The following documents are supplemental to the Dataverse Curation Guide: the Portage Dataverse North Metadata Best Practices Guide, the Scholars Portal Dataverse Guide, and the Data Curation Network CURATED Workflow and Data Curation Primers.