Congratulations to IASSIST members Kevin Schürer and Matthew Woollard! Professor Schürer has announced he’ll be leaving the directorship of the UK Data Archive in order to take up a new post at the University of Leicester as Pro-Vice Chancellor of Research later this year. Dr. Woollard, currently Associate Director and Head of Digital Preservation and Systems, will become Director-Designate from the beginning of March 2010. Read more at UKDA news.
The US Open Government Directive, released on December 8, 2009, instructs all federal agencies to provide high-value information to the public online in open, accessible, machine-readable formats. This adds to the momentum already in place at Data.gov to “increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government.” The Open Knowledge Foundation blog describes progress to date and milestones to come. The UK government also recently announced similar plans to open up data, and the imminent launch of a new Data.
U-M’s Gutmann to head NSF Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Directorate, University of Michigan News Service, July 27, 2009. Gutmann, who specializes in historical demography and population-environment relationships, currently directs the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR). He begins his NSF position Nov. 2. Jim Jacobs
There was a lot of hype when the new search engine WolframAlpha was launched earlier this year. An article in the current issue of Technology Review does a better job of explaining how it works and how it fits in with other search engines. It notes that the numeric information it uses is “curated” by Wolfram|Alpha employees – by which they mean the data are selected and acquired, not just contributed as with sites like Swivel.
As you may have heard during last week’s wonderful IASSIST meeting in Tampere, there are still spaces available in the ICPSR Summer Program course on DDI, to be held at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, on July 13-16. The course is titled “Documenting Data Using DDI 3.0: Supporting Research, Collection Management, and Access,” and instructors are Wendy Thomas (Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota) and Arofan Gregory (Open Data Foundation).
The IASSIST Quarterly IQ Vol. 31 issue 3&4 is now available on the web: http://iassistdata.org/publications/iq/iqvol31.html This issue will only be available on the web. There will be no printed version mailed out to the membership. This double issue is the work of the authors and their articles are introduced below. We are presenting an integrated double issue of high quality. We should also give a special thanks to the editors of the issue.
Several weeks ago, Google contacted me at BLS to let us know they were using some of our data in a launch of a new service in data visualization. Their plan is to make as much data available as possible with as rich a tool set as they can provide. To see an example, enter the phrase “US Unemployment Rate” in the Google search box. The top link sends you to a page that allows you to superimpose historical graphs of unemployment rates down to any county in the US.
The IASSIST Quarterly (IQ Vol. 31 issue 2 - 2007) is now available on the web: http://iassistdata.org/publications/iq/iqvol31.html This issue will be printed and mailed to the membership. From next issue IASSIST will be saving trees and only publish the IQ on the web. We hope you agree with our decision. Thanks. Some of you are now getting ready for the IASSIST conference in Tampere, Finland 26.-29. of May. Remember if you are giving presentations that you could write the presentation as an article for the IQ.
The UK Data Archive would like to announce the release of its new suite of web pages providing guidance on data management and sharing. The pages provide data creators, data managers and data curators with best practice strategies and methods for creating, preparing and storing shareable datasets. Advice has been divided into a number of key areas or modules providing detailed information on each topic. These are: · Sharing data - why and how?
The Edinburgh University Data Library celebrated 25 years of support for staff and students in their discovery, access, use and management of research datasets. On 5 December 2008, following on from the Digital Curation Centre international conference held in Edinburgh that week, friends and colleagues from near and far gathered in the afternoon at the EDINA offices to celebrate the milestone with short speeches and cutting the cake, along with food, drink and toasts.
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