- Report of the U.S. Regional Secretary
- by
- Ilona Einowski
- UC Data Archive and Technical Assistance
- University of California, Berkeley
- May 1998
Members were asked to report on their activities beyond the scope of IASSIST itself including local, national and international activities. The following summaries describe member activities in a variety of areas.
- Patty Becker (APB Associates, Inc. and University of Michigan) is Executive Director of the Southeast Michigan Census Council. She represented the Population Association of America on the Census Advisory Committee of Professional Associations and the American Civil Liberties Union on the Census 2000 Advisory Committee. Additional census activities included conducting training activities on the LUCA (Local Update of Census Addresses) program and assisting the Bureau in re-engineering the 2000 Census Master Address File program.
- JoAnne Dionne (Yale University) was the recipient of the William H. Flanigan Award for Distinguished Service as an ICPSR Official Representative.
- Ilona Einowski (University of California, Berkeley) has been involved in a project to enhance on-line access to US Census data. Working with The University Library and building on work done by Oregon State University’s Government Information Sharing Project and the Bureau’s LOOKUP program, they have provided on-line access to three of the Subject Summary Tape Files (SSTFs 2, 3 and 5) from the 1990 Census. This project can be viewed at : http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/GovData/info/.
- Fred Gey (University of California, Berkeley) is co-principal investigator of the DARPA research contract “Search Support for Unfamiliar Metadata.” This project aims to create mapping from ordinary language search terms to specialized classification schemes, including numeric classification such as Standard Industrial Classification (used for County Business Patterns and other economic data sets) and Harmonized Commodity Classification (used for foreign trade imports and exports). Further information can be found at http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/metadata.
- Dan Gillman (Bureau of the Census) is a member of the Inter-Agency Internet Data Dissemination Group, the NCITS L8 (Data Representations) Standards Committee and the ISO/IEC JTC1/SC32/WG2 (Data Management Services - Metadata) Standards Committee.
- Judith Rowe (Princeton University) continues to be involved with the International Centre for Information Management Systems and Services (ICIMSS) at Nicholas Copernicus University of Torun, Poland where she holds the position of Corresponding Member of the Board of Directors. In October 1997, Judith received the William H. Flanigan Award for Distinguished Service as an ICPSR Official Representative. The Award was presented at the 1997 meeting of ICPSR ORs where she and fellow recipient JoAnn Dionne were royally toasted by the IASSIST members present.
- Libbie Stephenson (University of California, Los Angeles) continued her work as a member of the ICPSR Council. Her work with the Archival Policy Committee produced a report in October 1997.
- Jean and Juri Stratford (University of California, Davis) received a grant from the Office of the President of the University of California to look at data protection policies in the United States.
- Wendy Treadwell (University of Minnesota) holds the position of Treasurer of IASSIST as well as Vice President of APDU (Association of Public Data Users). She is on the Standing Committee for Regional and Urban Statistics, International Association for Official Statistics, International Statistical Institute, The Netherlands and the SCORUS98 Program Committee. Wendy is also a sponsoring member of the Upper Midwest Conference on Demographics for Policy Makers and a Policy and Oversight Committee member of the Foundations for Integrated Access to Environmental Information. Her presentations during the past year address issues ranging from data distribution plans for future censuses to estimating changes between censuses as well as updates on both the American Community Survey and Census 2000.
- Susan Turkel (Bryn Mawr College), as part of the Instructional Technology Team, has been helping faculty make use of technology in the new “smart classrooms” on her campus.
- Annette Watters (University of Alabama) has been the chair of the National State Data Center Steering Committee. The Committee has been addressing issues including data dissemination, training needs, data access and preparing for Census 2000.
- And on a more personal note: Anne Cooper (Emerita - University of Wisconsin, Madison) wanted to say hello to everyone. For an update, see her website at: http://home.earthlink.net/~annelcooper.