IASSIST Communiqué

Happy Earth Day to everyone!!

Hope your day is filled with loads of celebratory reducing, renewing, and recycling.

Registration for this year’s IASSIST Conference (May 27-30): “Technology of Data: Collection, Communication, Access and Preservation” is proceeding at a rumbling pace, and the five conference hotels have been filling with eager California-bound IASSISTers.

However, if you still have not made your arrangements for this year’s conference, please consider doing so. Early registration ends soon (May 2), and of more immediate concern, the conference hotels will begin dropping our room blocks (and guaranteed conference rates) beginning this Friday, April 25. Exact dates for each hotel is listed on the Accommodations page on the conference web site. Online registration and the conference fee structure is available on the Registration page:

http://iassist08.stanford.edu/

The Program Committee has done an excellent job at organizing a fantastic array of workshops, plenaries, concurrent panel sessions, and poster sessions. We have two energizing plenary speakers to kick-start the first two days of the conference: Catherine Ruggles, who will discuss the new technologies developed to manage complex data and Elizabeth Miller, who will discuss the impact of technology on knowledge and understanding. The subsequent sessions run the gamut of technology’s intersection with all we do as data professionals — from metadata and the DDI to tools for data visualization, from data librarianship to data preservation and data repositories, from data confidentiality and security to data in the classroom and statistical literacy. Check out the full conference program schedule and descriptions on the web site for more information.

We have also planned a few post-conference excursions that are anchored in San Francisco at the King George Hotel in Union Square (shopping, theater, restaurants, Chinatown). Enjoy a ball game on Friday night (with fireworks) at AT&T Park. For the internet-addicted, bring your laptop, they’ve got wireless (it is AT&T Park…). Take a train to the Napa wine country on Saturday, and tour the city of San Francisco and Alcatraz on Sunday. See the Post-Excursion Trips page for more details.

As we begin this last week of April, we hope that we’ve whetted your appetite and got your blood going for IASSIST 2008. We are looking forward to hosting the conference and we are especially excited at the prospect of IASSIST invading the Silicon Valley this May!

Questions? Please check out the IASSIST 2008 web site at http://iassist08.stanford.edu/ or contact Ron Nakao at ronbo@stanford.edu.

Safe travels!

the ‘08 Local Arrangements Committee

[copied from a post to the IASSIST membership list by Terrence Bennett.] I’m sure that this announcement will show up on a lot of lists, but in case you haven’t yet seen it elsewhere, here it is.

The Census Bureau is enhancing “American FactFinder,” the Internet gateway for downloading data from the Census, the American Community Survey, and other selected Census Bureau resources.

If you would like to suggest enhancements to AFF (or just to learn about the enhancements that are already planned), you can do so at:
https://questionweb.com/63144/

Further information from the Census Bureau appears below. Regards,

Terrence Bennett
Business/Economics Librarian
The College of New Jersey

Enhanced American FactFinder (AFF) Comments Requested

The U.S. Census Bureau is enhancing the current American FactFinder (AFF) to add features and improve its functionality.

As users of our data, we value your input and want the enhanced AFF to meet as many of your needs as possible so that you can easily access and use data available at the Census Bureau. Therefore, we would like your input about the new system.

We have identified a number of improvements which are described in the link below. Please review them and then provide up to five additional items you would like to see incorporated into the new system. (Note: The survey will be available for comments beginning today, March 10 - March 31, 2008.) Given the limited resources available for enhancing the AFF, the Census< Bureau may not be able to implement all the suggestions.

https://questionweb.com/63144/

*******************************************
Nancy M. Gordon
Associate Director for Strategic Planning
and Innovation
U.S. Census Bureau

I took a long look at UNData the other day and came away thinking “pretty; looks functional; how does it relate to other UN products, esp. the ones we’re paying for”. I sent those questions to the feedback address and Mr. Zoltan Nagy responded with the following helpful information. Thought I’d share in case others had the same questions…

“UNdata is the United Nations Data Access System which gives access to current, relevant and reliable statistics for free. The service is provided by the United Nations to users of data around the world. It offers easy access to data compiled and produced by United Nations
agencies as well as other organizations.

UNdata’s main features are:
- accessing different data sources through one interface,
- searching data with keywords and browsing databases,
- refining search results by filtering, and
- customizing tables with features such as sorting, column
selection and pivoting.

UNdata and the UN Common Database (UNCDB)
UNdata is replacing the UNCDB. The new system goes beyond the concept of the UNCDB, starting from the way the data is stored and searched to the data presentation. Furthermore, the UNCDB only includes a small selection of UNSD’s extensive data collection, whereas UNdata will have broader data coverage from various international and national
sources.

The UNCDB series are currently available through UNdata under the new name “Key indicators”. Please note that the Key indicator’s scope has already been reduced, as some of the series have been included from the original data provider.

The UNCDB will be discontinued this summer after the academic year finished in most schools around the globe.

UNdata and COMTRADE
UNdata is not replacing COMTRADE. COMTRADE is a very comprehensive database for merchandise statistics containing around 1.5 billion trade records in 7 classifications up to 6 digit level of the classification. In addition, the COMTRADE interface offers many more
features that are specific to this large trade statistics dataset, e.g. the search by partners and reporters to create mirror images.

UNdata contains only around 40 million trade records only in 2 digit HS 1992 classification and searchable only by reporters. ”

Posted on behalf of Amy West

Luis Martinez-Uribe, Digital Repositories Research Co-ordinator, is based at the Oxford e-Research Centre and will be conducting a scoping study to capture researcher’s needs for repository services to manage, curate, preserve and disseminate research data generated in Oxford.

A new blog (http://oxdrrc.blogspot.com/) has been set-up to record the progress of the project while disseminating outputs and information about relevant activities.
If you are interested in following the progress of this project you can subscribe to the RSS feed (http://oxdrrc.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default)

posted for Luis by Robin Rice

The Open Data Foundation is pleased to announce that an ODaF Europe 2008 meeting will take place at the UK Data Archive on April 14-15. This regional event is open to all members as well as individuals and agencies interested to learn more about ODaF or to share ideas. For further information and registration, see
http://www.opendatafoundation.org/events/odaf_europe_2008.php

Looking into the future, we currently anticipate holding a US regional meeting on Oct 2-3 at the Sun Microsystems headquarters in Manhattan, NY and our Annual Meeting in Washington DC in December. The Institute for the Study of Labour (IZA) in Germany and the Open Data Foundation (ODaF) are also happy to announce that ODaF Europe 2009 will be hosted on the IZA campus in Bonn next spring (details to be announced in time).

[text taken from http://www.opendatafoundation.org/blog/?p=23]

Submitted by Robin Rice

Announcing new deliverables from the DISC-UK DataShare project:

• DISC-UK DataShare: Web 2.0 Data Visualisation Tools, by Stuart Macdonald.

• The Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) and Institutional Repositories, by Luis Martinez.

Both briefing papers can be retrieved from http://www.disc-uk.org/deliverables.html .

There is also a new “Collective Intelligence” page with a tag cloud to links from our social bookmarks of reports, websites, and blogs related to the project themes.
http://www.disc-uk.org/collective.html

A newsfeed of deliverables and new bookmarks is available from the project blog at http://jisc-datashare.blogspot.com/

Contributed by Robin Rice

Cellphone Numbers Just Don’t Add Much To Political Polling, By Carl Bialik, Wall Street Journal, February 1, 2008.

Using examples from Canada, Norway, and Australia, this report recommends that the U.S Census Bureau provide an online data collection option for all major household surveys that allow a paper response including the Census and promote the Internet survey response option as a secure, low-cost, and time-saving option.

• e-Census Unplugged: Why Americans Should Be Able to Complete the Census Online by The Information Technology And Innovation Foundation, January 29, 2008.

Given the increasingly digital world that we live in, most Americans will be surprised to learn that they will be unable to complete the 2010 Census online. In a new report, ITIF analyzes the decision made by the U.S. Census Bureau to eliminate the Internet response option and concludes that allowing respondents to submit their survey online would have saved the Census Bureau and taxpayers money. In addition, ITIF challenges the conventional wisdom that using the Internet for such an application poses a security risk, and outlines how other countries have met this challenge.

- jim jacobs

First, on January 18th, an announcement was made on blog.wired.com that Google will be hosting terabytes of science data.

Sources at Google have disclosed that the humble domain, http://research.google.com , will soon provide a home for terabytes of open-source scientific datasets. The storage will be free to scientists and access to the data will be free for all. The project, known as Palimpsest and first previewed to the scientific community at the Science Foo camp at the Googleplex last August, missed its original launch date this week, but will debut soon.

Google may have just violated one of its operating principles, namely, “do no harm.” I am concerned that Google’s treatment of data as just another Internet commodity may undermine the work that data archivists have been labouring over recent decades to get researchers and research councils to take data preservation and access seriously. While the announcement does not address Google’s approach to data preservation, it is clear that the author sees this as an open access success story. How will data be transferred to Google?

(Google people) are providing a 3TB drive array (Linux RAID5). The array is provided in “suitcase” and shipped to anyone who wants to send they data to Google. Anyone interested gives Google the file tree, and they SLURP the data off the drive. I believe they can extend this to a larger array (my memory says 20TB).

Can we expect metadata to be slurped up with the data? Overall, the Google approach simply confounds science data with other digitally published resources, i.e., just another digital commodity. I would be much more reassured if science data were being cared by a non-profit, public institution. This is an issue that we should debate within IASSIST and one that we might well have to address in the wider scientific community. After all, Google will only succeed if scientists give them access to research data.

The second development was announced in a press release by the University of Manchester on January 22nd that our good friends in MIMAS will be building an Internet search engine competitive with Google.

The launch follows high profile criticism by a senior academic at Brighton University, who argued that students need to be taught to challenge the facts taken from Google or Wikipedia… [Executive Director Caroline Williams] said, “Google isn’t discriminating about the material it chooses - and with no systematic quality control processes it is very difficult for people to explore and discover trusted information. But automation combined with human value judgments, can be more responsive and dynamic in meeting the needs of higher and further education.”

Time for a rhetorical question: if the academic community can’t trust Google to deliver scholarly search results, why would this community trust Google with research data?

- submitted by Chuck Humphrey

For those tech-types who do their own data munging, here’s a rant from Mark Dominus, a Perl programming wizard who was briefly stymied by trying to process a large data file from Census. As we face these issues daily in my office, I thought I’d share the frustration!

Of course, he doesn’t mention where he thinks metadata “should” go but I have a pretty good idea what he would suggest….