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4                                                                                             IASSIST Quarterly Winter 2002                                                                                                                                         IASSIST Quarterly Winter 2002                                                                              5

Editor’s Notes

Again a warm welcome to the IASSIST Quarterly - IQ vol. 
26 issue 4.  Three articles are presented in this issue. 

Back at the IASSIST 2002 conference in Storrs, CT in the 
session “The New Frontier for Archives” Kevin Schürer 
from the UK data archive in Essex presented the project on 
“Edwardians Online”. The paper by Emma J. Barker and 
Louise Corti is presented now in the IQ. The Qualitative 
Data Service at the archive has released a pilot, web-based, 
multimedia resource. We are far from the rows and columns 
of numbers normally associated with data archives and 
the article also gives you a presentation of the “Qualidata” 
unit. The data collection consist of interviews that lasted 
up to four hours and transcribed to 80 typed pages. It is 
surprising that the qualitative methods are combined with 
great numbers. You will find that there in the 1970ʼies were 
carried out 444 qualitative interviews of this kind! You can 
learn more about the project in the article, and obviously 
you can have a look at the web-site. 

In the next article – also from a data archive - Anne Sophie 
Fink gives us the story about “A Danish Research Portal on 
the Internet”. The article is about the web presence of the 
Danish data archive structured around data production, data 
archiving and data usage. The archive is viewed not only 
as a collector and disseminator of data but as an enabler 
of flows of communication (and data) among the actors. 
Basically the broader perspective should permit users to 
suggest and add content to the web site. The paper was 
presented at the Storrs IASSIST conference and was in 
line with the conference theme of “accelerating access”. 
Anne Sophie Fink presented the article in the session called 
“Research Portals”. 

From the same 2002-conference and from the same session 
Jessica Eustace from the University of Manchester presents 
the paper “Reaching your end-user with MIMAS”. The full 
session title was called “Research Portals, or the Truth is 
Out There” which calls for agents – intelligent ones! - as 
the portal should be a facility to provide one-stop-shop 
for users  ̓needs in e-journals, bibliographic databases and 
other research support facilities. The paper highlights how 
the cross-disciplinary services at MIMAS can support the 
creation of a research paper. The paper describes services 
like the Archives Hub and COPAC that brings access to 
data and merged catalogues, as well as the citation indexes 
in the Web of Science and the access to journals through 
the JSTOR facility. In the article Jessica Eustace use the 
stages of the research paper (introduction, literature review, 
etc.) to illustrate how researchers make use of the services.

An obvious follow-up of these articles that describes 
facilities on the web for support of researchers will be 

an evaluation of these sites and portals. I will be looking 
forward to receiving articles for the IQ describing 
methodologies for the evaluation as well as empirical 
results of evaluation by stakeholders. 

Access IASSIST at the web on www.IASSISTdata.org. 

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

Karsten Boye Rasmussen,  August 2003  

 

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