Opening remarks for the 50th anniversary IASSIST conference

It is an IASSIST tradition for the President to give opening remarks at the first plenary of the annual conference. Below are Robin Rice“s opening remarks on 4th June in Bristol, England, for the 50th anniversary IASSIST conference, as the outgoing President for 2025.

Good morning and welcome to IASSIST 2025: Bridging oceans, harbouring data & anchoring the future. A great theme for our 50th anniversary conference, and more prophetic than I would have guessed when the Programme Committee came up with it back in the autumn of 2024, but that’s a thought for another time.

I’d like to dwell a bit, with your indulgence, on the 50th anniversary. On April 10-12 in 1975, the founders of IASSIST gathered at the London School of Economics here in England for a humbly named “IASSIST Organizing Committee Meeting”. Having organised on the back of the previous year’s 8th World Congress of Sociology in Toronto, we knew they were serious about the need for a conference focusing on ‘data archives and program library services’ (in other words, saving and sharing both data and code), apart from the academic topics discussed there. We also knew they were serious about having fun, as in 2 years’ time they famously hosted their conference in Cocoa Beach, Florida in February, 1977. But that was one tradition that didn’t stick, we’ve not had a beach setting ever since, and nobody knows why. Well, Carolyn Geda probably does, who was the first president, based at ICPR, now ICPSR , at the University of Michigan.

Anyway, by 1975 the Panel Study of Income Dynamics had been running for 7 years, the General Social Survey for 3 years, and the second of a string of longitudinal studies in the UK, the British Cohort Study , for 5 years. As everyone knows, these were analysed on huge computers with less computing power than is on this tiny phone I hold. The IASSIST Quarterly, or IQ, wouldn’t be published for another 2 years. Out in the world The Hustle , by Van McCoy (who?) was a massive hit in the US and Canada and reached number 3 in the UK.

Jumping ahead to 1985, Judith Rowe from Princeton was President of IASSIST, and the conference was held in Amsterdam with a theme that never gets old, “Public access to public data”. That was the year the International Social Survey Programme began sampling over a million respondents across countries (5 then) with harmonised questions. “Cataloging Machine-Readable Data Files: An Interpretive Manual” was written by Sue A. Dodd and published by ALA three years earlier. The Macintosh had been introduced by Steve Jobs a year earlier, sporting the first mouse and graphical user interface.

1995 was the early dawn of the World Wide Web, with Netscape Navigator replacing Mosaic as the browser of choice that year. Apparently IPUMS (Integrated Public Use Microdata Series) had a website that year, but typically, they were delivering data through anonymous FTP. The 1990 1% sample was huge – 163 megabytes. Chuck Humphrey was the outgoing IASSIST president, and the conference was in Quebec at Universite Laval, called “Partners for access: working together in a changing data environment (L’acces aux données dans un environnement en pleine mutation: un partenariat à developer)” (forgive me for not trying to read it in French). Chuck mastered the combination titles of our conference themes; he was also our first webmaster . And he started the tradition of showing pictures from the event at the closing ceremony: mostly ones he took, with off the cuff comments and captions that made us giggle. According to an IQ article by Mary Vardigan, this was also the year the DDI standard , Data Documentation Initiative, was conceived by a small international group. And from 1996, Wendy Watkins from Carleton University and others would challenge Statistics Canada to embark on a ‘data liberation’ initiative’ (DLI) to free up government data to researchers.

Now I’m going to speed up, ‘cause you see where I’m going with this. 2005 Ann Green, from Yale, was President, and we had the conference in – oh yes, Edinburgh. I was there, were any of you? The theme was “Evidence and Enlightenment”, and as I recall we added a fourth parallel stream to accommodate all the papers for the first time. Some even stayed on for a weekend in Pitlochry and watched Highland Games. The winner of the first conference paper prize award was Reduce, reuse, recycle: issues in the secondary use of research data , by Margaret Law, University of Alberta, from where Chuck hailed. Most of the major repository platforms were in use; Github didn’t exist yet but its antecedents did. Wikipedia had become the most popular reference site on the Internet, with 750,000 articles and social networking was redefining the internet (Web 2.0 having been popularised by Tim O’Reilly the year before).

In 2015, you may recall, data was the new black, the new oil, it was a valuable asset, and it was BIG. Bill Block from Cornell was our outgoing president, with his top ten tweets at the closing ceremony of Minneapolis - “Bridging the data divide: Data in the international context”. It must have been a busy wrap-up, because we also had a conference song, a tradition at that time started by Melanie Wright from the UK Data Archive, with her guitar, and taken up by an enthusiastic choir. The lyrics were sung to the tune of Prince’s Little Red Corvette. The refrain went,

We’re at IASSIST!
It will go much too fast
Now it’s IASSIST!
Data nerds will make it last

Which brings us to 2025, where all of you will help us make our history again. We already know this period will be marked in the future by the advent of generative AI, a high water mark for research data management, the building momentum of Open Science/Open Research, new and continuing data rescue initiatives, and unhappily, outright attacks by populist governments on much we hold dear as data professionals – science and research itself on hot button topics like climate change, and diversity, equality, and inclusion; libraries and librarians; data collections and data producers – their jobs and their funding; even universities and their student bodies. Shout out to the delegates from Harvard who are here: I am sure that you have all of our sympathy and solidarity in your fight for academic freedom and self-determination, as a long-lived educational institution – even older than the US government. We stand behind you, in more ways than one.

So there we are. If you’re wondering how I know all this IASSIST-related history, some of it I recall, most of it is on the IASSIST website; all of it is google-able. If you want more data and computing history, check out the transcript of Judith Rowe’s famous, The Decades of My Life speech , published in the IQ in 1999.

And so now it’s time to greet our plenary speaker for today, who will be introduced by Prof Felix Ritchie, our local host.

Robin Rice is Data Librarian and Head, Research Data Support at the University of Edinburgh.