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4                                                                                             IASSIST Quarterly Spring 2003                                                                                                                                         IASSIST Quarterly Spring 2003                                                                               5

by 

Editorʼs Notes

Welcome to the IASSIST Quarterly - IQ vol. 27 issue 1. 
Three articles are presented in this issue. 

The article from Ken Reed, Betsy Blunsdon, Nicola 
McNeil (Deakin University, Victoria, Australia) and 
Steven McEachern (University of Ballarat, Victoria, 
Australia) was presented at the IASSIST conference (May 
2003, Ottawa) in the session with the title “Strengthening 
Numbers: measurement, aggregation and policy”. The 
Reed, Blunsdon, McNeil & McEachern article has the title 
“Integrating public domain data to construct community 
profiles”. The paper describes the construction of a 
database of community characteristics at the postcode 
level. A community is described by variables in the areas 
of economic, social, political and cultural characteristics. 
These publicly available data from a wide variety of 
sources are in the project collated and integrated. The 
data are supporting multi-level research enabling the 
contextualization of individual behavior by data on the 
context in which people live their daily lives, such as the 
neighborhood, school, community or region. There is a 
great deal of data available in the public domain, but these 
are collected for a wide range of purposes, and with great 
variation in the units of analysis. The project on local 
areas in Victoria, Australia relates to other neighborhood 
projects in the USA (Los Angeles and Chicago). The 
database has information on the years 1996 and 2001, 
which are years in which there was both a national census 
and a national election. From a variety of sources data 
is included on businesses, crime and suicide, licensed 
premises, information about religious institutions, schools, 
recreational facilities, cultural organizations and services.

The second paper is also from the May 2003 IASSIST 
conference in Ottawa. The paper gives an insight into a 
new archive by the authors Hannele Keckman-Koivuniemi 
and Mari Kleemola, both research officers at Finnish 
Social Science Data Archive. The title of the paper is 
“Data Processing in FSD: Challenges in a New Archive”. 
The Finnish data archive started in 1999 situated at the 
University of Tampere and funded by the Ministry of 
Education. The archive has about thirteen employees and 
has archived about 400 studies. The archive is a social 
science data archive and receives data files in SPSS, Excel, 
SAS or ASCII formats. Intensive data processing is carried 
out at the FSD in order to make the data corresponding the 
original questionnaire. The data is documented in SPSS 
files, the integrated documentation is obviously considered 
important, but a more extensive documentation is also 
made through the use of the DDI. 

In the last article from one of the IASSIST key figures 
Chuck Humphrey - past president of IASSIST and an 
active person at almost every IASSIST conference – you 

are invited to take a look into the major accomplishments 
of IASSIST in the past decade. This article is for both 
newcomers and old members of IASSIST. While looking 
back Chuck Humphrey is at the same time into the process 
of setting the goals for the future of IASSIST. In the 
past IASSIST has been active in helping to set up data 
archives and in obtaining members outside the traditional 
geographical areas of IASSIST (North America, Europe 
(Western) and Australia). The Outreach program that 
started in 1996 has brought in many new members to 
IASSIST conferences and spread the information about 
IASSIST. In the communication room the website on the 
Internet was the biggest move in the past. Apart from 
delivering services directly to the members, IASSIST has 
also been active as participants and initiators of metadata 
standards like the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI). 
Many more points are made in the article. Read the article 
and contribute by articles to the IQ or by stating your 
opinion on the IASSIST mailing list. 

Remember to visit the IASSIST website on 
www.IASSISTdata.org. 

Papers for the IASSIST Quarterly are most welcome. 
Please contact the editor (kbr@sam.sdu.dk). 

Karsten Boye Rasmussen,  November 2003.  

 

http://www.iassistdata.org/
mailto:kbr@sam.sdu.dk