Import your data from Dovetail

You can easily transfer data stored in Dovetail to your Marvin repository. With this feature, you don’t lose your research and can customize how you migrate and organize it in Marvin.

In this article, you’ll learn what kinds of data you can transfer, where it is stored in Marvin and how to complete the process.

Before you begin, please reach out to us at [email protected]. Our support team will enable the option for you. Once we send you a confirmation, you’ll see the option under “New project” on the homepage

Select “Import from Dovetail” to begin the transfer.

You’ll need to migrate each project in Dovetail separately. With this, you can customize the transfer settings for each project.

In Dovetail, download the Highlights and Project Data from the three dots menu. You’ll also see these instructions when you begin the transfer in Marvin.

Click “Next” to upload these files and choose settings for the project in Marvin.

Project name: If you want to keep the project recognizable for the users that were accessing it in Dovetail, we recommend you retain the same name.

Project date: By default, Marvin will set the date for all files in the project to the one when you’re importing the project. However, we recommend that you change this to the date when the research was conducted. You can use this information to apply time period filters in Ask AI and Cross-project analysis to get more targeted results.

In case you need to change the date of an individual file later, you'll find this option on the Annotation Tool and the project page.

Share project: Decide which team members you want to share the project with. You can keep it private, share with the entire team, all admins or all editors (Notetakers, Contributors and Admins).

Now choose whether you want to migrate all the data in your Dovetail project or only specific types of information.

Marvin can transfer all these file types from a Dovetail project:

You can also transfer your insights, highlights (notes on Marvin) and tags (labels on Marvin).

Before you proceed, you must decide if you want to transfer

- Only files

- Only insights

- Only tags

- Only Files + highlights*

- Everything (files, highlights, tags, insights)

*All highlights are attached to specific files in Dovetail. You can only import highlights if you also import the project files.

You can also choose to publish all insights in the project while importing the data. We recommend this if you want to ensure that everyone can access these reports.

You cannot import answer blocks, summaries and search boxes inside Insights and text documents in Dovetail. At the moment, you also can't import any CSV files stored in your Dovetail project.

Unfortunately, we don’t receive this data from Dovetail a compatible format, and do not have control over this.

For each project you export from Dovetail, you’ll see a corresponding project created in Marvin.

You’ll find each file replicated in the Marvin project. If the file contains any embedded videos, audio, text, PDFs or Excel (.xlsx) files, you’ll be able to access a link to each of this embedded data.

Marvin will also separately import each of these embedded files into the project*. You’ll see them in the list of project files.

*Images inside text documents will not be added as separate files.

When you click “Next”, Marvin will begin the import. It can take between 15 minutes and 1 hour, depending on the size of the project.

Once complete, you’ll see a summary of the files that were successfully transferred to Marvin. You’ll also receive these details via an email, so feel free to close this tab. Marvin will keep processing the transfer in the background.

That's it! You're ready to start working on your research in Marvin.

Facing any issues? Reach out to us at [email protected].

Q. Can I import multiple projects together?

A. You must import each project separately, as the data you migrate may differ by project. However, you can import multiple projects simultaneously.

Q. Which data will not be imported?

A. Answer blocks, summaries, search boxes inside Insights and text documents, and a few other custom embeds will not get imported. At the moment, you also won't be able to import CSV files in your Dovetail project.