IASSIST/CSS 1998 Conference Theme

Access for the individual user to both numeric and textual data has increased exponentially through services offered via the Internet, in particular through the World Wide Web. The role of libraries and data archives has expanded from local holder of physical collections to gateway to a multitude of information providers and to being global providers of information. For faculty and students, the Internet offers opportunities for instructional innovation, additional channels of communication, and access to data traditionally believed to be inaccessible. This information explosion raises a number of legal, economic, archival, administrative, and technical questions for users, producers, and service providers. In addition, ease of access for the end user produces both opportunities and challenges for local instructional and research support. Join IASSIST and CSS as we explore challenges and strategies to put the new technology to optimal use, to create a structured and functional 'global village' rather than a chaos of information overflow.

Within the general theme, we will focus on several subthemes including:

New avenues for academic teaching

• Bringing primary research into the classroom
• Instructional technology (CD-ROM, multimedia, Internet)
• Distance Learning
• Teaching qualitative methods in a network environment
• Push technology in the classroom
• Computer literacy standards for students and faculty
• Electronic reserves, course materials on the WWW

Quantitative data in the age of the Internet

• Data libraries in the age of FTP
• Wholesale delivery to statistics on demand
• Interfacing web form based user demands and statistical software
• Limits of "remote data analysis"
• Improving access to policy and public opinion data

Non-traditional data analysis, presentation, and support

• Revitalization of textual (document) analysis
• Graphical presentation; scientific visualization; spatial analysis
• Software for computer-assisted content analysis

Training and ongoing support for the end user

• Who has the responsibility? what are reasonable expectations?
• Training models and materials
• Changing job profiles to cope with changing technologies

Technical aspects of data base management and Web delivery

• Integrating data and documentation in WWW based data systems
• Interfacing multi-purpose data bases and Web servers
• Facilitating user access (response time, transmission speed, etc.)
• Converting print media to electronic storage, migrating and preserving digital information

Metadata standards, resource discovery

• Metadata format options (HTML, PDF, RTF, SGML, etc.)
• Metadata content standards, the Data Documentation Initiative
• Bringing social science documentation into the digital age
• Locating resources: thesauri, indexing, Internet resource discovery systems
• Data documentation on the WWW

Social Implications of Global Networking

• MUDs, MOOs, and personal identity
• Long distance scientific collaboration over the Internet
• Ethical issues for scientific research on computer networks
• Economic and Legal Implications in International Perspective
• "Internet for free" vs. "Internet for fee"
• Authors' royalties and publishers' profits vs. limited library budgets
• Copyright and fair use, privacy, confidentiality, security
• Government data and access fees
• Assessing quality and validity of information via the Web

In addition to sessions devoted to these specific themes, there will be opportunities to present other topics of interest to the membership of the two sponsoring organizations.

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