iBlog

E-Science and Data Support Services: A Study of Association of Research Libraries Member Institutions http://bit.ly/cKmaO6 . more...

"On 20 October, 2010 [20.10.2010] the World will celebrate the first World Statistics Day, to raise awareness of the many achievements of official statistics premised on the core values of service, professionalism, and integrity."  For more information and resources, see:

http://unstats.un.org/unsd/wsd/

More info on what the response has been in Canada is avilable here: http://capdu.wordpress.com/   Very interesting to watch this unfold if you are interested in data or interested in how these community responses  develop. 

Michael Witt, assistant professor of library science and interdisciplinary research librarian at Purdue University, has been awarded a Fulbright scholarship. He will spend January to May of 2011 at the Bibliotheca Alexandria in Egypt. Michael’s research focuses, in part,on the roles of librarians in data curation and managing electronic resource collections. more...

It appears that the Federal Government has decided to no longer have the
mandatory long form in the upcoming census (2011).  This is the list of
detailed questions filled out by about 20% of households.  It will be
replaced with another voluntary survey.   This has many potential
implications, especially for those using the census 'longitudinally'.  
It may have some positive spinoffs, since the replacement has a
potentially larger sample size.   The disturbing part is that we are not more...

The International Household Survey Network (IHSN) just released a new publication on “Principles and Good Practice for Preserving Data”. This document produced by the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social research (ICPSR) provides basic guidance for managers in statistical agencies who are responsible for preserving data using the principles and good practice defined by the digital preservation community. more...

I am just attending CANHEIT and saw a presentation on  http://islandora.ca .  I thought this was a really neat project and I really like their appliance approach to distributing this.    In a way I thought  what they are building  touched on some of the vision presented by Pascal at http://ciser.cornell.edu/IASSIST/program/d3.shtm .

Welcome to the new (May, 2010) IASSIST website, based on Drupal open source technology and hosted by LIS-host. The new logo and website artwork was commissioned by the Publications Chair, Walter Piovesan, and done by Josh Laidlaw, from British Columbia.

Harrison Dekker, from University of California-Berkeley, is our 'drupal guru' who has done the lion's share of the work, porting over the old content and setting up the new format. more...

Announcement of Workshop:
Providing Social Science Data Services: Strategies for Design and Operation
http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/sumprog/courses/0041
August 9-13, 2010
Ann Arbor Michigan

Instructors:
Chuck Humphrey, Head of the Data Library, University of Alberta
Jim Jacobs, Data Services Librarian Emeritus, University of California San Diego more...

In the March 27, 2010 issue of Science News, this article talks about how "widespread misuse of statistical methods makes science more like a crapshoot". The problem appears to be based in the misunderstanding and misuse of the concept of statistical significance. more...