By robin | May 17, 2011
The new issue of the IASSIST Quarterly is now available on the web. This is the volume 34 (number 2, 2010).
http://iassistdata.org/iq/issue/34/2
The layout has changed. We hope you’ll enjoy the new style presented. It seems to be a more modern format and more suited for the PDF presentation on the web. Walter Piovesan – our publication officer – had a biking accident. To show that nothing is so bad that it is not good for something Walter used his recovery time to redesign the IQ. Furthermore, Walter is the person in charge of the upcoming 2011 IASSIST conference, so he is a busy guy. And I’m happy to say that Walter should be fit for the conference.
This issue of the IQ features the following papers:
Rein Murakas and Andu Rämmer from the Estonian Social Science Data Archive (ESSDA) at the University of Tartu describe in their paper “Social Science Data Archiving and Needs of the Public Sector: the Case of Estonia” how the archive had a historical background in the empirical research of the Soviet Union.
From the historical background we move to web 2.0 in a paper by Angela Hariche, Estelle Loiseau and Philippa Lysaght on “Wikiprogress and Wikigender: a way forward for online collaboration”. The authors are working at the OECD and the paper’s statement is that “collaborative platforms such as wikis along with advances in data visualisation are a way forward for the collection, analysis and dissemination of data across countries and societies”.
The third paper addresses an issue of central importance for most data archives. The question concerns balancing data confidentiality and the legitimate requirements of data users. This is a key problem of the Secure Data Service (SDS) at the UK Data Archive, University of Essex. The paper “Secure Data Service: an improved access to disclosive data” by Reza Afkhami, Melanie Wright, and Mus Ahmet shows how the SDS will allow researchers remote access to secure servers at the UK Data Archive.
The last article has the title “A user-driven and flexible procedure for data linking”. The authors are Cees van der Eijk and Eliyahu V. Sapir from the Methods and Data Institute at the University of Nottingham. The data linking relates to research combining several different datasets. The implementation is developed for the PIREDEU project in comparative electoral research. The authors are combining traditional survey data with data from party manifestos and state-level data.
Articles for the IQ are always very welcome. They can be papers from IASSIST or other conferences, from local presentations or papers directly written for the IQ.
Notice that chairing a conference session with the purpose of aggregating and integrating papers for a special issue IQ is much appreciated as the information reaches many more people than the session participants and will be readily available on the IASSIST website.
Authors are very welcome to take a look at the description for layout and sending papers to the IQ: https://www.iassistquarterly.com/index.php/iassist/about/submissions.
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 or editors I will also be delighted to hear from you.
Karsten Boye Rasmussen, editor