vol28-4.indd


4      IASSIST Quarterly Winter  2004     

Editor’s Notes

Welcome to the fourth issue of the IASSIST Quarterly vol. 
28. 

This issue brings us an article on Wikipedia. I have to 
excuse the production time of the IQ. When this article was 
received the concept of Wikipedia was not so widespread as 
it rightfully is now. However the idea has proven durable. 
Oliver Watteler from the data archive (Zentralarchiv) in 
Cologne in Germany – part of GESIS – presents us for 
the fundamentals of Wiki: The Wikipedia is a Web-based 
encyclopedia. It is a free and copyleft product to be used, 
read, updated and improved by anyone. The “copyleft” 
concept is closely connected to open source and freeware, 
which highlights the free “as in free speech, not as in 
free beer”. But you can read much more on this at the 
http://www.wikipedia.org. Oliver Watteler is proposing a 
wikipedea for IASSIST members with coverage of typical 
IASSIST topics. As he writes it: “wiki could carry the 
IASSIST spirit one step further into the virtual world”. 
Remember to visit a part of the virtuality in IASSIST: the 
new IASSIST weblog (blog) - IASSIST Communiqué – at 
http://iassistblog.org. 

Chiu-Chuang (Lu) Chou is a senior special librarian at the 
Data and Program Library Service (DPLS) at University 
of Wisconsin Madison, United States. She participated in 
a three-day workshop called Statistical Disclosure Control 
for Data Confidentiality with the software ARGUS. The 
ARGUS software intention is to “modify unsafe data in 
such a way that safe (enough) data emerge, with minimum 
information loss”. As Lu Chou explains The Statistical 
Disclosure Control is mainly concerned by obtaining 
a balance between the need for data and the need for 
confidentiality. The software was developed as part of the 
European Commission’s Fifth Framework Programme. This 
was addressing work towards a “user friendly information 
society” and statistical information is part of that society. 
Lu Chou also looks at the US Federal statistical system and 
how statistical disclosure control is obtained there. 

At the IASSIST conference in Edinburgh 2005 there was 
a session on “New Insights in Providing Data Services: A 
Variety of Evidence”. Some of the evidence in the form of 
a case was the presentation on “Data archiving at the US 
Central Bank”. The article was presented and is written by 
Linda Powell, who works at the Board of Governors of the 
Federal Reserve System where vast quantities of data are 
“consumed”. The article demonstrates and discusses several 
challenges in connection with the diverse pool of data, user 
access from several platforms as well as the growth of data 
archiving. The last also includes the dynamic challenge that 
data consistency over time means dealing with a changing 
subject, as some concepts and their calculation change over 
time. Among the technological advances Linda Powell 

explicitly mentions XML that is used in several ways, 
including the XBRL standard. 

Please visit at the IASSIST website on www.IASSISTdata.
org. You can now find information on previous and 
coming conferences. The 2006 conference will take 
place at Ann Arbor, Michigan (23-26 May). You will 
also find information on the Publication Award for 2006. 
Furthermore, on the IASSIST website you will find access 
to the articles of the IASSIST Quarterly as PDF-files. We 
hope you will enjoy all of this. 

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, October 2005