New Dewey User Experience
On June 30th, 2025, Dewey rolled out a completely new user experience and platform. This improved platform was built from the ground up to create a more complete and customizable experience that meets the needs of our customers.
Behind the scenes, we completely overhauled our backend and data pipelines to meet the growing demands of our usage and scale into the future. It's crucial that Dewey consistently utilizes the latest and most efficient data architecture, enabling us to minimize costs for our end users.
Together, these changes will help the Dewey team quickly iterate and launch new products and features to advance our mission of transforming data access and management for academic researchers.
What are the new features of this update?
Discoverability
- Improved navigation with nested supplementary files
- Smarter search across names, descriptions, and column descriptions
- Standardized dataset details and key points (historical coverage, observation level collection methodology, etc.)
- Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for each primary dataset
- Metadata for MARC records
- Clear data provider terms
Collaboration
- Invite your research teammates and co-authors
- Save datasets to specific teams
- Native user approval workflows for admins
Filter and Download
- Additional options for a more granular data customization
- Column removal from exports
- Row-based filter targets and requirements
- Updated Python client (R coming soon)
What did we drop?
Before this update, over 95% of the data was downloaded on the platform via the API. As a result, we've made the decision to (temporarily) remove Snowflake and S3 exports and have instead invested in further developing our R and Python clients to increase the functionality of our API.
What comes next?
As we test the new system, we're temporarily setting a limit of two (2) data customizations per day per user. We'll continue to monitor to load and reasses this limit over time.
With these changes, we'll be able to add additional features and products in the future more quickly. Some features in our pipeline include:
- Additional export options
- Admin-controlled data provisioning and permissions (Institutions-only)
- Data catalog features and the ability to add your own datasets (Institutions-only)
- Natural language and attribute-specific search
If you have feedback or would like to pilot these features, don't hesitate to reach out!