University of Waterloo
                    Electronic Data Service Task Group
                     Minutes of Meeting Mar. 23,  1994


Present:  Albert Kemp
          Sue Moskal
          Doug Morton (Sec.)
          Bill Oldfield (Chair.)
          Richard Pinnell

Guests:   Boris Bruder
          Debbie Tytko

CC:       Bruce MacNeil,  Mike Ridley

1.   Minutes of Previous Meeting
     9.  Richard Pinnell brought information about a database of
     interest to a faculty member (rather than advertising).

2.   Business Arising
     Carol Vogt has talked with the person in DCS responsible for
     ATTIC.  There is some concern about the reliability of the
     Exabyte tapes when used with such large data files.  Optical
     storage technologies are being investigated.

3.   Additional Agenda
     7.4  Census Geographic Files

4.   CMC Task group on Electronic Data
     The group is still being struck; it is unclear as to whether
     we will have a representative on the group.  Every effort
     will be made to ensure that our views are represented.

5.   Terms of Reference
     The Terms of Reference are now a Mission Statement, the
     label "Task Group" was changed to "Working group".  Debbie
     Tytko is added to the membership.

6.   CANSIM / EPAS
     Progress continues on the part of those outside the Working
     Group.

7.   Census and GSS data
     It was agreed to concentrate on the Census data this time.

7.1  Inventory & 7.2  Description
     Printouts were distributed of what is known to be on campus
     of the 1991 Census data and it looks very much like we do
     not have as much as has been released.  Followup efforts for
     the next meeting include:
     - Determining what the files are that we have (the inventory
     is rather cryptic)
     - Determining what files have been offered
     This should allow us to figure out what we are missing and
     to take steps to fill in the gaps.

7.3  Acquisition
     We are expecting that the Materials Acquisition Dept. will
     become more involved with the process of acquiring the
     electronic datasets.  As discussed in 7.1 there are problems
     identifying what has arrived.

7.4  Census Geographic Data
     Richard Pinnell has checked with Statistics Canada and
     determined that files such as the "Digital Boundary file"
     and the "Street Network File" are available in ARCINFO and
     MAPINFO formats, which are of interest to GIS users.

8.   Codebooks
     Space in LIB 222 has been allocated for the codebooks but
     they have not yet been moved from DCS.

9.   User Interface
     Discussion began about the suitability of Mosaic and Lynx as
     a front end to the datasets.  There is a need seen for more
     information and capabilities than are provided in WATCAT.

10.  Next Meeting
     March 30, 1994,  LIB 428,  1:30 pm.