October 5, 2006
Luis Martinez, IASSIST member and Data Librarian at the London School of Economics, has begun an entry on Wikipedia on the topic “Data Library”. Luis welcomes this community’s help in fleshing it out and providing more context. For those who have never been involved with Wikipedia, the editors come round and add comments, and often seem to judge the importance of an entry based on the number of people involved with ‘curating’ it.
September 20, 2006
The MIT Dewey Research Advisor is a database of business and economic FAQs and answers. The focus is definitely business and economics, but for those areas it is a useful and easy to use resource for finding quick answers to common data (particularly aggregate data and time series data) and statistical reference questions. jajacobs
August 24, 2006
GovMine is a new search engine that might become useful in searches for data and statistics. Features that look particularly promising: categorized grouping of search results, including a category “Statistical Data” (try this sample search). I didn’t find this category frequently, but its appearance at all is tantalizing! a search of .gov sites relevance ranking (which they make a point of being different from “popularity”) boolean search operators “disambiguation” hints An article (Convera releases beta of gov’t search engine) says that it is an “engine designed to help U.
July 19, 2006
Intute was launched on 13 July 2006 at an event held at the Wellcome Trust, London. Intute is the new face of the Resource Discovery Network (RDN), and is a free national service enabling lecturers, researchers and students to discover and access quality Internet resources. Intute exists to advance education and research by promoting the most intelligent use of the Internet. Caroline Williams, Executive Director of Intute said, “the environment in which we operate is rapidly changing.
July 18, 2006
Joe Doll would like to start a discussion: “I am in receipt of the IASSIST Quarterly journal but am wondering what other means/media data librarians read on a regular basis, be it a journal, newsgroup, magazine, blog.” Any and all suggestions are welcome! Contributed by Joe Doll via Bill Block
June 22, 2006
During the colloquy hosted by the Chronicle of Higher Education today, there were a number of questions about the role of libraries and librarians in preservation of and access to data. Although the focus was on e-science more than social science, the questions and answers might be of interest. All the questions and answers are available here. D. Scott Brandt, associate dean of libraries at Purdue University, is helping to build a repository of scientific data.
June 19, 2006
The Chronicle of Higher Education is sponsoring an online discussion on Thursday, June 22 on the topic of preserving data. The Chronicle: Colloquy: Data Deluge Thanks to digital technology, scientists are generating vast amounts of valuable data that, months later, may be irretrievable or indecipherable. Librarians are being called in to archive that information, but financial, technical, and even cultural barriers stand in the way. Who should pay for archiving digital data?
June 19, 2006
In their never ending quest for information, Jen, Tiffani and Paula would like to know about people’s experiences cataloging data. Do you use MARC format? Have you tried using DDI? At what level do you tend to catalog collections? How does it depart from cataloging traditional library matter? Enquiring minds want to know. Contributed by Jen Darragh
June 19, 2006
Recently I posted a message to the IASSIST mailing list about a study in in the ICPSR Publication Related Archive that had a data file in an old (SST) statistical software format. I had no tools to convert or even read that file and was looking for a solution to get the data. I solved that problem through the kindness of the software producer who converted the file for me.
June 13, 2006
The Washington Post reports that the personal information recently stolen from the VA “was stored in a format that could make it difficult for thieves to use, according to an internal VA memo.” In the May 5 memo, VA privacy officer Mark Whitney wrote that the critical data “may not be easily accessible” because most of it – including names, birth dates and Social Security numbers – was stored in a specialized, standard format used for data manipulation and statistical analysis.
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