4   IASSIST Quarterly  2015

IASSIST Quarterly

Editor’s notes
Standardization supporting diversity of use 
 

Welcome to the fourth issue of Volume 39 of the IASSIST 
Quarterly (IQ 39:4, 2015). 

This issue of the IASSIST Quarterly brings four papers 
from the IASSIST 2015 conference in Minneapolis. All four 
have their focus on research data. We take off with the 
development of curation software, and continue with 
the special problems of handling video streams because 
of the current heterogeneous policies requiring much 
effort from researchers. Next follows recommendations 
for good practices for research data repositories and for 
university programs in including data management. These 
three papers overall discuss issues of standardization and 
how that can benefit researchers and other users of data. 
The fourth paper demonstrates that standardization in 
building data collections and software does not necessarily 
lead to standardized use, by describing the use of data 
in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in very diverse 
subject areas.   

The first paper is ‘New Curation Software: Step-by-Step 
Preparation of Social Science Data and Code for Publication 
and Preservation’ by Limor Peer and Stephanie Wykstra. The 
conference presentation was in the session ‘Curation and 
Research Data Repositories’. Limor Peer is Associate Director 
for Research at Yale University’s Institution for Social and 
Policy Studies (ISPS) and Stephanie Wykstra is Research 
Manager of Research Transparency at Innovations for 
Poverty Action (IPA). The curation software for reviewing and 
enhancing research data and code is being developed by 
research groups at these two institutions in collaboration 
with Colectica. Social research carried out at ISPS and 
IPA includes field experiments. The paper begins with a 
discussion of the value of data sharing, and leads on to a 
description of key curation tasks and the support offered by 
new curation software. There is an appendix with a detailed 
description of the curation tasks and also many references 
and useful links.
 
Purdue University has a research project using big data and 
visual analytics based on over 60,000 publicly accessible 
video feeds (e.g. weather or traffic cameras). The large 
quantity of data raises questions about its management. 
This is described in the paper ‘Comparing policies for open 
data from publicly accessible international sources’, that was 
presented in the conference session ‘Data Professionals’. The 
authors Line C. Pouchard, Megan Sapp Nelson, and Yung-
Hsiang Lu are assistant or associate professors at Purdue. 
Such data sources currently have heterogeneous policies 
for data use. The paper compares different policies and 
describes the implications for open access. The discussion 
uses examples of the law relating to data privacy in the 
US and EU such as the UK data protection policy based 
on the European Union Data Protection Directive. Fifteen 
policies were analyzed and are presented in graphics. To 
illustrate the research burden, the paper describes policies 
having different use restrictions, all of which the researcher 
has to abide by when collecting from the various video 
feeds. The authors propose a template of standards for the 

components of the policies, as implementation of standards 
could support scientific use and reuse of video data.  

The third paper ‘Research Data Repositories: Review of 
current features, gap analysis, and recommendations for 
minimum requirements’ is by a group of Canadian authors: 
Claire C. Austin, Susan Brown, Nancy Fong, Chuck Humphrey, 
Amber Leahey and Peter Webster. The work was presented 
in the conference session ‘Data Repository Models and 
Infrastructure’ by Amber Leahey. The group surveyed 32 
Canadian and international online data platforms and 
compared features and services. Alongside this work 
Research Data Canada developed and published guidelines 
for deposit and preservation of research data. As with the 
other papers in this volume, this paper carries extensive 
literature references as well as excellent documentation 
of the work through the text and appendices. In the 
conclusion, the authors recommend that best practices 
for data management should be incorporated widely in 
university studies to support research by building capacity 
and skills. 

Students directly experiencing use of research data in their 
study programs is addressed in the fourth paper ‘Teaching 
users to work with research data: case studies in architecture, 
history and social work’ by Aaron Addison and Jennifer 
Moore, who both work at Washington University in St. Louis. 
This work was presented at the ‘Training Data Users II’ session 
at the 2015 conference. The teaching of research data was 
based on using GIS in three contexts: primary collection, 
digital data reuse and mined textual data. The examples 
from different disciplines addressed subjects ranging from 
climate change through reconstruction of history to data for 
villages in India. There is a strong argument that visualization 
and location with GIS supports the understanding of data. 
Further support of GIS is found in the long list of learning 
outcomes experienced. The paper delivers a thorough 
description of the examples used in the problem-based 
teaching in the various disciplines

Articles for the IASSIST Quarterly are always very welcome. 
They can be papers from IASSIST conferences or other 
conferences and workshops, from local presentations or 
papers especially written for the IQ. When you are preparing 
a presentation, give a thought to turning your one-time 
presentation into a lasting contribution to continuing 
development. As an author you are permitted ‘deep 
links’ where you link directly to your paper published in 
the IQ. Chairing a conference session with the purpose 
of aggregating and integrating papers for a special issue 
IQ is also much appreciated as the information reaches 
many more people than the session participants, and will 
be readily available on the IASSIST website at http://www.
iassistdata.org.  



IASSIST Quarterly  2015   5

IASSIST QuarterlyIASSIST Quarterly

Authors are very welcome to take a look at the instructions 
and layout: 
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(s) I will also be delighted to hear from you.

Karsten Boye Rasmussen    
January 2016      
Editor