IASSIST Quarterly Summer 2010 5 IASSIST Quarterly Editor’s notes New format - new papers Walter Piovesan – our publication officer – had a biking accident. To show that nothing is so bad that it is not good for something, Walter used his recovery time to redesign the IQ. I hope you like it. I like it! Furthermore, Walter is part of the local arrangements committee, along with Mary Luebbe, in charge of the coming 2011 IASSIST conference, so he is a busy guy. And I’m happy to say that Walter is now fully recovered. Welcome to the IASSIST Quarterly volume 34 (2) of 2010. This issue of the IQ features the following papers: Rein Murakas and Andu Rämmer from the Estonian Social Science Data Archive (ESSDA) at the University of Tartu describe in their paper “Social Science Data Archiving and Needs of the Public Sector: the Case of Estonia” how the archive had a historical background in the empirical research of the Soviet Union. After Estonian independ- ence the creation of the social science data bank acquired momentum and the data archive was established in 1996. The following year the data archive became a member of the European Council of Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA). This paper was presented at the IASSIST 2009 conference in the session “Building Data Archives and User Communities: Greece, Estonia and Ethiopia”. From the historical background we move to web 2.0 in a paper by Angela Hariche, Estelle Loiseau and Philippa Lysaght on “Wikiprogress and Wikigender: a way forward for online collaboration”. The paper was presented at IASSIST 2010 Conference at Cornell University, Ithaca. The authors are working at the OECD and the paper’s statement is that “collaborative platforms such as wikis along with advances in data visualisation are a way forward for the collection, analysis and dissemination of data across countries and societies”, and their paper “presents two wiki platforms that can support such a vision: Wikiprogress and Wikigender”. These applications support the OECD’s shift from measuring (only) economic production to measuring well-being and the general progress of societies. The third paper addresses an issue of central importance for most data archives. The question concerns balancing data confidentiality and the legitimate requirements of data users. This is a key problem of the Secure Data Service (SDS) at the UK Data Archive, University of Essex. The paper “Secure Data Service: an improved access to disclosive data” by Reza Afkhami, Melanie Wright, and Mus Ahmet was pre- sented at IASSIST 2010 in the session “Secure remote access to restricted data”. The SDS will allow researchers remote access to secure servers at the UK Data Archive. In the paper many related issues in legal, contractual, educational, and technical areas are discussed and examined. On top of this support the SDS may potentially open access to previously closed data and thus further facilitate new research. The last article has the title “A user-driven and flexible pro- cedure for data linking”. The authors are Cees van der Eijk and Eliyahu V. Sapir from the Methods and Data Institute at the University of Nottingham. The paper was presented at IASSIST 2010 in the panel on “Virtual Research Environments: Tools for Presenting and Storing Data”. The data linking relates to research combining several different datasets. The paper defines the relational database operations that can be used as flexible and end-user directed choices. The implementation is developed for the PIREDEU project in comparative electoral research. The authors are combining traditional survey data with data from party manifestos and state-level data. The paper exemplifies the linking of voter and manifesto studies, and also addresses more complex data linking and merging. Articles for the IQ are always very welcome. They can be papers from IASSIST or other conferences, from local pres- entations or papers especially written for the IQ. If you don’t have anything to offer right now, then please prepare yourself for the next IASSIST conference and start planning for participation in a session there. Chairing a conference session with the purpose of aggregating and integrating papers for a special issue IQ is much appreciated as the information reaches many more people than the session participants and will be readily available on the IASSIST web- site at http://www.iassistdata.org. Authors are very welcome to take a look at the description for layout and sending papers to the IQ: http://iassistdata. org/iq/instructions-authors Authors can also contact me via e-mail: kbr@sam.sdu.dk. Should you be interested in compiling a special issue for the IQ as guest editor or editors I will also be delighted to hear from you. Karsten Boye Rasmussen March 2011 Editor