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4 IASSIST Quarterly Fall 2001

Editor's Notes

The Data Documentation Initiative has had workshops,
special sessions and general good publicity in IASSIST
connections since the 1995 IASSIST conference in Québec.
This issue of IASSIST Quarterly brings you a paper from
the IASSIST/IFDO conference last year in Amsterdam. The
DDI has evolved and in a session on “DDI Tables” this
paper from the University of California (Berkeley) and
from the California Digital Library at the same university
appeared. The paper is titled “Using DDI Extensions as an
Intermediary for Data Storage and Data Display” and is
written and prepared by Patricia Cruse, Marsha Fanshier,
Fredric Gey, and Margaret Low. In the paper they are
addressing the problem of providing metadata for multi-
dimensional files (or aggregate files or tables). The solution
based upon use of XML is shown in the paper.

At the IASSIST/IFDO conference last year a session was
devoted to “Digital Archiving”.  I believe that the subject is
much too important to leave to archivists alone and it also
has the attention of governments and the EU. The paper
from Concha Fernández de la Puente at the European
Commission, DG Information Society is titled “The
European Union initiatives in the digital archive area:
achieving the Information Society” and the point of
departure of the paper is that initiatives from the European
Union has had the goal of ensuring that all European
citizens have easy access to information. The many
initiatives in the areas of electronic document management
and exchange are reviewed in the paper. Among the
initiatives are DLM-Forum which have had widely partici-
pation from archivists. The paper surely points further in its
conclusion where the citizen-friendliness of on-line
government is mentioned as well as “the ideas and values
which have shaped the European Union”.

Another session at the same conference was on “Qualitative
Data”. I could mention that this session also had its paper
on DDI, but here we are looking at a very different content
than the values of variables or columns that the DDI was
invented for. Culture often implies a notion of being
analog, personal, and difficult to disseminate. Tiina
Mahlamäki from the University of Turku describes in the
paper “From the Field to the Net: Cataloguing and
Digitising Cultural Research Material” how tape-recorded
interviews was catalogued and transferred for use on the
Internet. Tiina Mahlamäki explains that the oral tradition
became an important aspect of the folkloristic research in
the Nordic countries in the mid-1960ies and an important
part of the fieldwork. The individualistic trait of culture
also applied to the culture researchers as every project
followed its own principles of archiving. The paper
describes the project of standardization and digitisation of
this cultural research material.

The last paper in this issue of IASSIST Quarterly is from
the opening plenary at the Amsterdam conference. The title
of the plenary was “Inter- and Intra- National Archives in
the New Millennium: Issues, Strategies and Models” where
Yvette Hackett from the National Archives of Canada
presented “A National Research Data Management
Strategy for Canada: The Work of the National Data
Archive Consultation Working Group”. Yvette Hackett
gives an account of how recommendations for preservation
of data for the social sciences and the humanities lead to a
working group and project that are investigating questions
about how to meet the needs of the research community
and to take advantage of new technologies.

When this issue of the IASSIST Quarterly reaches you the
2002 conference in Storrs, Connecticut will be over. I am
certain it has been a successful conference and that you can
look forward to receive papers from that conference in the
coming issues of the IASSIST Quarterly.

May 2002. Karsten Boye Rasmussen