I'm putting together a few codebooks/data dictionaries for our transparency portal, http://ledger.illinoiscomptroller.gov. In doing so I have been reviewing some examples to get an idea of what civic hackers look for in such a document.

My working plan is to prepare them as .md files that can be loaded into a data frame. Is there anything else I should keep in mind? Do you have an example of an ideal codebook? Thanks ~btl

I'm putting together a few codebooks/data dictionaries for our transparency portal. In doing so I have been reviewing some examples to get an idea of what civic hackers look for in such a document.

My working plan is to prepare them as .md files that can be loaded into a data frame. Is there anything else I should keep in mind? Do you have an example of an ideal codebook?