vol29-3.indd 4 IASSIST Quarterly Fall 2005 Editor’s Notes Welcome to the third issue of the IASSIST Quarterly vol. 29. IQ volume 29 is still called 2005, while we are now enjoying being in 2006. From the IQ-team we do not expect or even hope to be totally current, but we are happy to be gaining on some of our rather persistent backlog. In the past year our gaining has been explicitly due to the work of the co-editors Louise Corti and Wendy Watkins, but I also want to thank all the authors of articles for the IQ as well as the reviewers / proof readers working behind the scenes plus all the people working on the technical side with layout, printing, distributing, etc. of the IASSIST Quarterly. This work is all undertaken with good will and voluntarily! The first article in this issue is from the IASSIST conference in Edinburgh in May 2005. Bobray Bordelon is the Pliny Fisk Librarian of Economics and Finance/ Data Services Librarian at Princeton University and presented at the conference his paper: “Cross-national & intergovernmental data: paying for one-stop shopping”. The point of departure for the article is that since most organizations lack the resources to build its own interface and provide the ongoing maintenance it is relevant to explore the choices for a commercial aggregator. Bobray Bordelon examines and characterizes four “aggregators”: Datastream International, EIU World Data, Global Financial Database, and Global Insight. The second article is from Louise Corti - Associate Director & Head ESDS Qualidata, Outreach & Training UK Data Archive – on “Qualitative Archiving and Data Sharing: Extending the reach and impact of qualitative data”. Louise Corti argues that while there is a well-established tradition in social science of reanalyzing quantitative data, there is still not yet a well developed paradigm, nor a pervasive research culture of sharing or secondary analysis of qualitative data. So the article is a promotion effort in that respect and calls for further internationalization of the debate that has begun in some countries. To get started on this debate you can have head start by – among other things in the article – reading about the six main perceived barriers that have been identified through contact with researchers, together with some pragmatic solutions to confronting these barriers. Lastly we have an article from our very own world. IASSIST maintains a very active list-server. The data – e.g. mails – from that list-server was collected some years ago and some categorization was performed on that collection. The article “Self Reflection of Virtuality in a Professional Association: a Compact Description of Mailing List Data” is a description of the IASSIST organization moving in the direction of a virtual community. We try to offer an answer to the jesting question: “Is there IASSIST life between IASSIST conferences?”. The ongoing IASSIST list-server, weblog and periodic IASSIST Quarterly should be a positive answer to that matter. The investigation was carried out by Repke de Vries, Department of Public Services at The Royal Library of the Netherlands, and myself. A crew of people are taking care of the IASSIST website so it is constantly evolving. You can take a tour at http:// iassistdata.org and visit the IASSIST weblog (blog) - IASSIST Communiqué – at http://iassistblog.org. The IASSIST website contains information on previous and coming conferences, including past presentations, as well as easy access to the published articles of the IASSIST Quarterly. Articles for the IASSIST Quarterly are most welcome. Papers can be generated from IASSIST conferences, from other conferences, from local presentation, discussion input, etc. Contact the editor via e-mail: kbr@sam.sdu.dk. Karsten Boye Rasmussen, June 2006