Preparing To Advance With 20-20 Re-Vision

Our annual Conference is serial expression of the work of this Association. To evoke library-land ontology still further, our presentations, those articles in the IASSIST Quarterly and the IASSIST website are the collective manifestation of its history.

Not there at the start of IASSIST, but it was in the 1980s that I was charged with developing a data library service. Reading the 10 years' content of the IQ, I gleaned two key challenges: standards for cataloguing for datasets and the drive to have data files regarded as first class objects. That exercise informed a paper commissioned by the Committee of Librarians and Statisticians, of the Library Association and the Royal Statistical Society.

Fast forward to the changed technology of the 1990s, IASSIST Conference themes included ‘numbers, pictures, words and sounds: priorities for the 1990s’, ‘stewardship of an expanding resource’, ‘data, networks, and cooperation: linking resources in a distributed world’ & ‘openness, diversity and standards’ - the latter for IASSIST 1993, hosted by Edinburgh University Data Library. Another 10 years on and opportunity to provide a retrospective at IASSIST 2003 on changing technology when reporting progress for Edinburgh’s Data Library and its younger sister EDINA. Much of all of this is summarised in a contribution to the special issue of the IQ dedicated to Sue Dodd, “a Pioneer Data Librarian”.

Then came the Web. But more than technology, there came digital curation, the admixture of digital preservation and data curation, followed by open access, institutional repositories & research data management, data now very much a first class object.

Of course, nostalgia is not what it used to be. Nevertheless, in celebrating fifty IASSIST Conferences, this paper seeks to leverage the past, intent on helping IASSISTers make even better history over the next 10, 20 or even 50 years.