Wendy Watkins The Data Centre Carleton University Ottawa, Ontario
May 1993
Given tight budgets, 1992-93 has been a very creative year for
Canadian IASSISTers! Several universities have banded together
for group purchases, group subscriptions, sharing training
resources and other co-operative ventures.
Thirteen western universities, the entire membership of the
Council of Prairie and Pacific University Libraries (COPPUL)
voted unanimously to form a federated membership in ICPSR.
Similar arrangements are being negotiated OCUL and CREPUQ
representing university libraries in Ontario and Quebec,
respectively.
In conjunction with COPPUL-ICPSR federation proposal, the
Universities of Alberta and British Columbia along with Simon
Fraser University jointly offered a data library workshop in
Calgary.
Further to the east, Statistics Canada's Quebec regional office
offered two, one-day workshops to librarians using their CANSIM
and Census CD data products. A workshop for "would-be data
librarians" was held in Quebec in April.
The year has seen two established data archives change places of
residence. The University of Alberta Library has taken
responsibility for the Data Library from the Computing Centre.
In addition, Carleton's Social Science Data Archives has been
moved from the Sociology Department and is now know as the
Library Data Centre, although responsibility for the function
rests with the Faculty of Social Sciences for a time.
While some of the 'old' archives were on the move, new data
libraries were established at the University of Calgary, the
University of Saskatchewan and Universite de Laval. In addition,
McGill, Guelph and Waterloo are thinking about establishing data
libraries.
The Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) organized
two further group purchases of data, this time for the 1991
Census of Population and the 1991 Census of Agriculture. This
bring the number of consortium bulk purchases to five. Previous
acquisitions included two sets of GSS data and the data from the
1986 Census of Population.
Last, but not least, two Freenets or community computing
facilities were established over the past year. The first in
Victoria was instituted in late 1992, while the National Capital
Freenet was launched in Ottawa in February of this year.
While I don't have statistics for the Victoria freenet, the
National Capital Freenet is now the second biggest in North
America with more than 4,000 registered users. Not to be left
behind, a group of committed people is currently planning the
Toronto freenet. They had their first planning meeting in late
April and had to turn people away at the door!
Thus, the theme for the year is sharing resources, forming
alliances and stretching scarce resources as far as possible.