vol26no1


4                                                                                IASSIST Quarterly Spring 2002                                                                                                                                      IASSIST Quarterly Spring 2002                                                                              5

Editor’s Notes

This issue Vol. 26-1 of the IASSIST Quarterly brings you 
three papers:   

Vernon Leighton from Princeton University delivered 
a paper “Developing a new Data Archive in a Time of 
Maturing Standards” at the session “A New Topical Data 
Archive: Building a Research Infrastructure for Arts and 
Cultural Policy Studies in the U.S.” at the IASSIST 2002 
conference in Storrs, CT. The paper describes how the 
CPANDA (Cultural Policy and the Arts National Data 
Archive) team has worked and chosen standards among the 
many customs, standards and standard applications. The 
old joke: “it is so nice with standards, because there are so 
many to choose from” does actually imply a lot of work. 
The paper discusses techniques and standards like XML, 
DDI codebook formats, archival management software, use 
of controlled vocabularies, full text indexing in database 
management systems and much more. The successful 
strategies, followed by CPANDA, have been to adopt 
previous efforts and to minimize duplication.

The paper from Robert G. Cromley and Patrick 
McGlamery on “Integrating Spatial Metadata and Data 
Dissemination Over the Internet” has not been part 
of a session in an IASSIST conference. However, the 
two authors did present some other work at the poster 
session at the 2002 conference in Storrs, CT. The authors 
Cromley and McGlamery are working at the Department 
of Geography and the Homer Babbidge Library at the 
University of Connecticut. Storrs, CT. The paper describes 
the components of the metadata records for spatial data 
and describes the supporting system that will bring this 
information to the users. 

Patricia Cruse, California Digital Library, University of 
California; Ilona M. Einowsky, UC Data/SRC, University 
of California, Berkeley, and Juri Stratford, Government 
Information and Maps, Shields Library, University 
of California, Davis presented at the IASSIST 2001 
conference in Amsterdam the paper “Applications in the 
Real World: The Counting California Experience with the 
DDI”. The Counting California initiative is committed 
to enhancing California citizens  ̓access to the growing 
range of social science and economic data produced by 
government agencies. This is accomplished by enabling 
users access to data compiled by federal, state, and local 
agencies through a single interface. As the title shows 
the paper is about metadata and the use of DDI (Data 
Documentation Initiative). But you should also visit the 
impressive website http://countingcalifornia.cdlib.org and 
have a look at the data. 

Remember that conference information is available on 

the web. You can see the PowerPoint presentation at 
the IASSIST web-site www.IASSISTdata.org where 
many “Multimedia Presentations” are available. If your 
presentation is not included you should contact the 
collector Lisa Neidert lisan@umich.edu. Papers from the 
conference are scheduled to appear in this and coming 
issues of the IASSIST Quarterly. Please contact the editor 
kbr@sam.sdu.dk. 

Plan ahead and make a note about the IASSIST conference 
in Ottawa in 2003 (May 27-30). 

Karsten Boye Rasmussen,  Oct. 2002  

http://countingcalifornia.cdlib.org
http://www.iassistdata.org/
mailto:lisan@umich.edu
mailto:kbr@sam.sdu.dk