Data Futures: Building on 30 Years of Advocacy
The International Association for Social Science Information Services and Technology (IASSIST) annual conference will be held at the University of Wisconsin, Madison on May 25-28, 2004. This year's conference, Data Futures: Building on 30 Years of Advocacy, examines new issues and trends and links them to principles that have emerged during the past thirty years.
Social science data producers, users, and support specialists have long understood and promoted responsibility for preservation, quality, stewardship, responsible use, and literacy. Juxtaposed against these guiding principles are pervasive and innovative national and international trends in data availability, access, and usage. New frontiers in data include the globalization of data and its commodification; integration of multimedia in research; and common concerns across nations and disciplines that confidentiality is an issue that requires constant attention.
IASSIST has been on the leading edge of data dissemination and access issues, critically examining developments in electronic delivery and privacy/confidentiality concerns. "Data advocacy" has included promoting statistical literacy among data professionals and the public; participating in the development of metadata standards for data; and working on solutions for preservation and archiving. The 2004 conference will build on this work with sessions that address various aspects of data advocacy. We seek submissions of papers, poster/demonstration sessions, and panel sessions on the following topics:
- Data services in physical and virtual spaces
- Applying metadata standards for data; exploring geospatial metadata, DDI, Dublin Core, etc.
- Archival challenges of the digital government
- Bringing numeric and spatial data into the classroom
- Collaborative data dissemination and integration projects
- Data Documentation Initiative (DDI): developments and implementations
- Data lifespan and integrity in web environments
- Promotion of data and statistical literacy
- Data quality and authentication
- Future of data warehousing and data mining
- GIS and data access
- Impact of Internet technology on social science research methods
- Infrastructure for data access and preservation
- Innovations in data delivery and access methods
- Data in institutional repositories
- Legal barriers to Internet-based data access
- Library subscriptions, licensing and data acquisition policies
- Metrics for assessing the value and impact of data in the knowledge economy
- New research/archive networks
- Preparation and dissemination of complex data for multiple user audiences
- Privacy, confidentiality, disclosure control issues
- Qualitative data issues: metadata, access, preservation, linking with quantitative data
- Relationships among archives and the social science research community
- The life cycle of research data and issues of preservation
- Universal access to public data
- User interfaces for data dissemination: best practices, innovations
- History and future of IASSIST
The deadline for paper, session, and poster/demonstration proposals is January 16, 2004.
The Conference Program Committee will send notification of the acceptance of proposals by February 6, 2004.
Session proposals should contain information on the focus of the session, the organizer or moderator, and possible session participants. It will be the responsibility of the session organizer or moderator to secure session participants.
Please send submission, including proposed title and an abstract (recommended length 150 words), to: julie.linden@yale.edu.
