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Guide: How to find the COLLECTION_ALIAS of a Dataverse collection

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Ken Lui edited this page Jan 28, 2025 · 6 revisions

How to find the COLLECTION_ALIAS of a Dataverse Collection

The COLLECTION_ALIAS of a Dataverse collection is a unique identifier often visible in the URL when accessing a collection via the web interface.

Here’s how to locate it:

Case 1: URL with ?alias=

In URLs containing ?alias=, the COLLECTION_ALIAS appears directly after the alias= parameter.

Example:
For the University of Toronto Dataverse at
https://borealisdata.ca/dataverse.xhtml?alias=toronto,
the COLLECTION_ALIAS is: toronto

Browser showing the University of Toronto Dataverse URL with the alias=toronto parameter highlighted.

Case 2: URL Ending with a Slash (/)

For URLs that do not include ?alias=, the COLLECTION_ALIAS might appear after the last / in the URL.

Example:
For a Dataverse collection with a URL like
https://dataverse.example.edu/dataverse/collection_name,
the COLLECTION_ALIAS is: collection_name

Browser showing the University of Toronto Dataverse URL with /toronto at the end of the path highlighted.

Usage in the Tool

Once you have identified the COLLECTION_ALIAS, you can input it into the command.

In this example, the COLLECTION_ALIAS is toronto. To run the tool with the following options:

  • Crawl the Representation & Data file dataset metadata (in JSON format) [-d]
  • Output the Representation & Data file dataset metadata in CSV format [-s]
  • Use the latest version of datasets in this collection [-v VERSION]

Use the command:

python3 dvmeta/main.py -c 'toronto' -v 'latest' -d -s
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