vol25.4


4                                                                                IASSIST Quarterly Winter 2001                                                                                                                                      IASSIST Quarterly Winter 2001                                                                              5

Editor’s Notes

The theme of the IASSIST 2002 conference in Storrs, CT 
was “Accelerating Access Collaboration and Dessimination”. 
The conference consisted of many good (“best ever”) and 
well attended workshops, streams, discussions, panels, 
and presentations. Many of the PowerPoint presentation 
are already available for viewing at the IASSIST web-
site www.iassistdata.org. On the web-site you can 
take a look under Multimedia Presentations from the 
IASSIST 2002 conference. If your presentation is not 
available 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. You can contact the editor (kbr@sam.sdu.dk). 

This issue Vol. 25-4 of the IASSIST Quarterly contains 
three papers from the 2002 conference: September 11th 
has affected nearly everybody, everywhere. Shortly after 
the acts the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) 
lauched the “National Tragedy Study”. The intention was 
to replicate the “Kennedy Assassination Study” carried out 
forty years earlier. For the session on ”The New Frontier 
for Archives” Tom W. Smith and Michael Forstrom from 
National Opinion Research Center and University of 
Chicago had prepared a paper with the title “In Praise of 
Data Archives: Finding and Recovering the 1963 Kennedy 
Assassination Study”. The paper explains that this task 
cannot be said to have been easy. This is a detailed descrip-
tion of a search for documentation and data for a single 
study. Luckily the needle in the haystack was retrieved, but 
again technology raised new difficulties, in this metaphor 
the problem was now the missing sewing machine. The 
conclusion is as the title says “praise for data archives”, if 
data and documentation had been properly stored at a data 
archive the similar task could have been routine and not an 
experiment in data excavation and the task could have been 
carried out in confidence of a positive outcome.

From the session on “eXtreme Intelligence: Pushing Expert 
Systems to Their Limits” Robert Wozniak from the Minnesota 
Population Center explores in his paper “Emerging from the 
Quagmire: Building Expert Systems Technologies for the 
Social Sciences” the latest technology for the discovery and 
access to social science data. Utilization of the web has moved 
the extraction expertise from the professional to the user and 
leaving the user in a quagmire. By taking advantage of the 
current technology and by utilizing domain knowledge both the 
novice and the expert will be assisted. The paper uses NHGIS 
National Historical Geographic Information System and its 
terabyte of United States summary census data as an example. 
The system is an expert system and is capable of deducing that 
a requested variable does not exist at the required geographical 
level and will expand to the next level to fulfil the request.

In the session called “Make It Faster, Make It Bigger: 
Developments in Data Delivery Systems” Micah Altman 
from Harvard University presented the paper “Open Source 
Software for Libraries: from Greenstone to Virtual Data 
Center and Beyond”. The paper provides an introduction 
to Open Source Software (OSS) and looks into questions 
like what are the advantages and disadvantages of OSS and 
which are most useful in the library environment. Among 
the advantages are cost and fast respondance to bugs and 
thus evolution of the software. The risk of using OSS could 
be the stagnation of software and a lesser degree of usability. 
For the data library or archive OSS can be of significance 
as it can be recompiled and ported to new hardware and 
operating systems which is important if the digital objects 
are requiring specific software. (Often the archive will try to 
store the objects in formats that are readable or transformable 
into other existing and even coming software packages). The 
paper also directly reviews some OSS packages for library 
use as well as gives addresses to these and other resources. 

Three papers from three sessions at the recent conference. 
Do have a good read of this issue of the IASSIST Quarterly. 

Karsten Boye Rasmussen,  August 2002  

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