4      IASSIST Quarterly  Fall & Winter  2007     

Editor’s Notes

Welcome to the IQ volume 31 double issue 3&4. This 
marks the end of the 2007 IASSIST Quarterly. This also 
marks the end of printing of the IQ. With this issue the IQ 
will only be available on the web-site, available for reading 
on-line and also for downloading and printing. The effort of 
bringing earlier issues of the IQ as scanned version to the 
web-site is continuing. 

This double issue is the work of the authors and their 
articles are introduced below. We are presenting an 
integrated double issue of high quality. We should also 
give a special thanks to the editors of the issue. Gretchen 
Gano is the writing guest editor of this IQ as you can see 
below. Gretchen Gano is the Assistant Curator Librarian 
for Public Administration & Government Information and 
Coordinator, Data Service Studio at New York University 
Libraries. Gretchen Gano collaborated on this issue from 
the start with former IASSIST president Ann Green. 
Together with the authors a great issue has been made. 

If some of you would be interested in compiling issues 
for the IQ as guest editor(s) please contact me. If you 
don't have anything to offer right now, then please prepare 
yourselves for the coming IASSIST 2009 if you are acting 
as chair for a session there. That is an obvious opportunity 
to bring quality sessions to more people than the session 
participants and also making the memory more sticky. 

Take a look at the website http://iassistdata.org and the 
IASSIST blog - the IASSIST Communiqué – at http://
iassistblog.org.

Articles for the IASSIST Quarterly are very welcome. 
Articles can be papers from IASSIST conferences, from 
other conferences, from local presentations, discussion 
input, etc. Contact the editor via e-mail: kbr@sam.sdu.dk.

Karsten Boye Rasmussen     -    December 2008

-

Introduction to the IASSIST Quarterly Special Issue on 
Data Services and Institutional Repositories 
Welcome to this special issue of the IASSIST Quarterly. 
This time we turn our attention to the broader environment 
for digital data collections. Contributors provide examples 
and analysis about how data makes its way between 
and among institutional collections in a complex data 
ecosystem. Data does not exist, nor does it move anywhere 
on its own, of course. Each author in this issue identifies 
challenges faced by those who participate in and support 
the research enterprise all along the way. The complexity 
of this ecosystem seems to increase as more institutions 
wish to share collections with one another and to migrate 
research data across digital repository systems. Data 
services and repository staff recognize the importance of 
designing systems to increase faculty participation and to 
move the data management partnership further “upstream” 
in the lifecycle to when the plan for designing questions 
and collecting data is first hatched. System designers find 
themselves adjusting existing technologies to optimize 
environments to care for research data as it is created, used, 
shared, and saved over the long term.