Authors: Huvila, Isto ¹

• 1 Uppsala University

The European Research Council funded research project CAPTURE has investigated the relatively unexplored question of what information about the workflows of creation, management and use of research data is necessary for data to be reusable in the future. This cross-disciplinary multi-methods research underlines the risk of producing documentation that is of little use. It also emphasises the importance of making the already existing information findable, and generating new documentation only on such aspects of workflows that otherwise remain undocumented. The project’s findings also underscore differences in the perspectives of data creators, managers and users indicating that the documentation generated by data creators and kept in data repositories is not always well-understood and usable for data users. Finally, the work in the CAPTURE project points to the need of conceptual clarity. We discuss paradata both as a form of information on workflows, processes and practices, and as a framework concept to discuss how people inform and get informed about workflows, processes and practices in general, in research and beyond.