vol281.indd


4      IASSIST Quarterly Spring 2004     

Editor’s Notes

Welcome to the first issue of the IASSIST Quarterly vol. 
28. When talking about publication of the IQ we are still in 
last year as vol. 28 is 2004, and the articles presented here 
are also from 2004, mainly from the IASSIST conference. 
Three articles are presented in this issue. 

From the IASSIST conference in Madison, May 2004, 
is presented a paper from the session on “Mapping the 
Past with GIS”. After the W3 a conference presenter has 
here creatively come up with C3. The paper from Stuart 
Macdonald at the Edinburgh University Data Library has 
the title of “Counting Cows and Cabbages” with the subtitle 
of “Web-based Extraction and Delivery of Geo-referenced 
Data”. The Geographic Information Systems are a growing 
area for the IASSIST community of data professionals. 
The paper demonstrates the scope of the Scottish Edina’s 
data services, and readers can here find information and 
expertise in setting up the GIS services. 

Several areas that are added to the normal data library 
services were presented in the conference session on “The 
Diverse World of Digital Libraries”. One of the papers 
addresses “oral history”. So we have now moved from 
the clean-cut quantitative numeric databases of the old 
days. The article is “Multimedia Oral History Database” 
by Zoltán Lux from the Institute for the History of the 
1956 Hungarian Revolution in Budapest. The oral archive 
has tape-recordings and transcripts of about a thousand 
interviews with participant in the 1956 Hungarian 
Revolution or their children.  The archive has since 2003 
been carrying out some digitization of the materials (incl. 
photos). Judged by the publications presented on the web-
site www.rev.hu there are many projects founded in these 
materials. 

The last article is also from the IASSIST 2004 conference. 
A session presented data from Asia and contained 
presentations on Vietnam, China, and Korea. Daniel C. 
Tsang is the author of “Reflections on a Quest for Social 
Science Data in Vietnam”. Dan Tsang is Social Science 
Data Librarian and bibliographer at the University of 
California, Irvine. The article is from his work during 
2004 as a Fulbright Research Scholar in Hanoi, Socialist 
Republic of Vietnam. Dan Tsang was based at the Institute 
of Sociology, Vietnamese Academy of Social Sciences. 
The article mentions the many social science data sources 
that are available in Vietnam, most importantly a wealth 
of statistical data available in yearbooks (CD-ROMs) as 
well as surveys. Being a country in fast development not all 
features are as we expect them to be from a myopic western 
viewpoint. Dan Tsang mentions that from researchers he 
heard that “data is power” – but actually as it turns out 
“data is money” is more suitable, as many datasets are 
being marketed for a highest bidder. 

Pay a visit at the IASSIST website on www.IASSISTdata.
org. You can find information on previous and coming 
conferences, and the upcoming conference is in Edinburgh 
in 2005 (24-27 May). Among other features of the website 
is the possibility to access the articles of the IASSIST 
Quarterly as PDF-files. 

Papers for the IASSIST Quarterly are most welcome. 
Papers can be from IASSIST conferences, from other 
conferences, from local presentation, etc. Contact the editor 
via e-mail: kbr@sam.sdu.dk. 

Karsten Boye Rasmussen,   March 2005