Already a member?

Sign In
Syndicate content

Europe

IQ Special Quadruple Issue: The Book of the Bremen Workshop

Welcome to this very special IASSIST Quarterly issue. We now present volume 34 (3 & 4) of 2010 and volume 35 (1 & 2) of 2011. Normally we have about three papers in a single issue. In this super-mega-special issue we have fourteen papers from the countries: Finland, Ireland, United Kingdom, Austria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Norway, Slovenia, Belarus, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland and Switzerland. This will be known in IASSIST as the “The book of the Bremen Workshop”.

The workshop took place in April 2009 at the University of Bremen. The workshop was hosted by the Archive for Life Course Research at Bremen and funded by the Timescapes Initiative with support from CESSDA. The background and context of the workshop as well as short introductions to the many papers are found in the Editorial Introduction by the guest editors Bren Neale and Libby Bishop. The many papers are the result of the effort of numerous authors that were instrumental in the development and fulfillment of the many outcomes of the workshop. The introduction by the guest editors shows impressive lists of short-term activities, agreed goals, and also strategies for development. There are future initiatives and the future looks bright and interesting.The focus of the Bremen Workshop is on “qualitative (Q) and qualitative longitudinal (QL) research and resources across Europe”. I would have called that a qualitative workshop but you can see from the introduction and the papers that this subject is often referred to as “qualitative and QL data”. The “and QL” emphasizes that the longitudinal aspect is the special and important issue. In the beginning of IASSIST data was equivalent to quantitative data. However, digital archives found in the next wave that the qualitative data also with great value were made available for secondary research. The aspect of “longitudinal” further accentuates that value creation.

This is a growing subject area. During the processing one of the authors wanted to update her paper and asked for us to replace the sentence “80 archived qualitative datasets and yearly around 30-40 datasets are ordered for re-use” with “115 archived qualitative datasets and yearly around 50-60 datasets are ordered for re-use”. Yes, we do have a somewhat long processing time but this is still a very fast growth rate. I want to thank Libby Bishop for not being annoyed when I persistently reminded her of the IQ special issues. I’m sure the guest editors with similar persistency contacted the authors. It was worth it.

As in Sherlock Holmes we might look for what is not there as when curiosity is raised by the fact that “the dog did not bark”. IASSIST has had and continues to have a majority of its membership in North America so it is also remarkable that we here present the initiative on “qualitative (Q) and qualitative longitudinal (QL) research” with a European angle. Hopefully the rest of the world will enjoy these papers and there will probably be more papers both from Europe but also from the others regions covered by the IASSIST members.

Articles for the IQ are always very welcome. They can be papers from IASSIST conferences or other conferences and workshops, from local presentations or papers especially written for the IQ. If you don’t have anything to offer right now, then please prepare yourself for the next IASSIST conference and start planning for participation in a session there. Chairing a conference session with the purpose of aggregating and integrating papers for a special issue IQ is much appreciated as the information in the form of an IQ issue reaches many more people than the session participants and will be readily available on the IASSIST website at http://www.iassistdata.org.

Authors are very welcome to take a look at the description for layout and sending papers to the IQ:
http://iassistdata.org/iq/instructions-authors
Authors can also contact me via e-mail: kbr@sam.sdu.dk. Should you be interested in compiling a special issue for the IQ as guest editor (editors) I will also delighted to hear from you.

Karsten Boye Rasmussen
Editor August 2011

Image Credit: by mitko-denev on flickr

IASSIST Quarterly (IQ) volume 34-2 now on the web

The new issue of the IASSIST Quarterly is now available on the web. This is the volume 34 (number 2, 2010).

 http://iassistdata.org/iq/issue/34/2

The layout has changed. We hope you’ll enjoy the new style presented. It seems to be a more modern format and more suited for the PDF presentation on the web. Walter Piovesan – our publication officer – had a biking accident. To show that nothing is so bad that it is not good for something Walter used his recovery time to redesign the IQ. Furthermore, Walter is the person in charge of the upcoming 2011 IASSIST conference, so he is a busy guy. And I’m happy to say that Walter should be fit for the conference.

This issue of the IQ features the following papers:

Rein Murakas and Andu Rämmer from the Estonian Social Science Data Archive (ESSDA) at the University of Tartu describe in their paper "Social Science Data Archiving and Needs of the Public Sector: the Case of Estonia" how the archive had a historical background in the empirical research of the Soviet Union.

From the historical background we move to web 2.0 in a paper  by Angela Hariche, Estelle Loiseau and Philippa Lysaght on "Wikiprogress and Wikigender: a way forward for online collaboration". The authors are working at the OECD and the paper's statement is that "collaborative platforms such as wikis along with advances in data visualisation are a way forward for the collection, analysis and dissemination of data across countries and societies”.

The third paper addresses an issue of central importance for most data archives. The question concerns balancing data confidentiality and the legitimate requirements of data users. This is a key problem of the Secure Data Service (SDS) at the UK Data Archive, University of Essex. The paper "Secure Data Service: an improved access to disclosive data" by Reza Afkhami, Melanie Wright, and Mus Ahmet shows how the SDS will allow researchers remote access to secure servers at the UK Data Archive.

The last article has the title "A user-driven and flexible procedure for data linking". The authors are Cees van der Eijk and Eliyahu V. Sapir from the Methods and Data Institute at the University of Nottingham. The data linking relates to research combining several different datasets. The implementation is developed for the PIREDEU project in comparative electoral research. The authors are combining traditional survey data with data from party manifestos and state-level data.

Articles for the IQ are always very welcome. They can be papers from IASSIST or other conferences, from local presentations or papers directly  written for the IQ.

Notice that chairing a conference session with the purpose of aggregating and integrating papers for a special issue IQ is much appreciated as the information reaches many more people than the session participants and will be readily available on the IASSIST website.

Authors are very welcome to take a look at the description for layout and sending papers to the IQ:

http://iassistdata.org/iq/instructions-authors

Authors can also contact me via e-mail: kbr @ sam.sdu.dk. Should you be interested in compiling a special issue for the IQ as guest editor or editors I will also be delighted to hear from you.

Karsten Boye Rasmussen, editor

Regional Report 2009-2010: Europe

IASSIST Regional Report 2009-2010
Europe
Brigitte Hausstein
GESIS
May 31, 2010

» Report in PDF format.

Regional Report 2008-2009: Europe

IASSIST Regional Report 2008-2009
European Region
Mari Kleemola
Finnish Social Science Data Archive
June 12, 2009

Cross European Collaborations | National Reports

This report begins with some observations on cross-national collaborations, after which will be country-by-country reports of national/institutional/individual activities. more...

SPARC Digital Repositories meeting includes session on open data

Kathleen Shearer of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries organized and chaired a panel on Open Data was held at the SPARC Digital Repositories meeting on November 8, 2010.  IASSIST members Gail Steinhart and Chuck Humphrey were two of the three members on this panel.  Kevin Ashley, Director of the Digital Curation Centre (DCC), was the third. more...

  • Iassist Quarterly

    Publications

    Sharing data and building information

    With this issue (volume 35-3, 2011) of the IASSIST Quarterly (IQ) we return to the regular format of a collection of articles not within the same specialist subject area as we have seen in recent special issues of IQ. Naturally...
    more...

  • Resources

    Resources

    A space for IASSIST members to share professional resources useful to them in their daily work. Also the IASSIST Jobs Repository for an archive of data-related position descriptions. more...

  • community

    • LinkedIn
    • Facebook
    • Twitter

    Find out what IASSISTers are doing in the field and explore other avenues of presentation, communication and discussion via social networking and related online social spaces. more...