University of Waterloo

                 Electronic Data Service Task Group

             Minutes of the Meeting of November 9, 1994

Present:  Doug Morton (chair), Richard Pinnell (secretary), Albert Kemp, 
Susan Moskal, Bill Oldfield, Shabiran Rahman, Carol Vogt

cc:  Bruce MacNeil, Mike Ridley, Boris Bruder, Charles Woods

1. Minutes of the Previous Meeting - November 2, 1994
    item 8, change "Allan Gale" to "Alan Gale"
            change "Susan Waterman" to "Susan Waterman-McLean"

2. Business Arising
    item 2.6  Bill has been unable to compile the Z39.50 program on the 
DEC alpha but has compiled it on the IBM RISC 6000; he will confer with 
DCS staff about compiling it on the library machine.  Bill reported that 
he has attempted to get a copy of the Web to PAT program and the Web to 
SAS program from his contact person at the University of Michigan but has 
not yet heard back.  Carol pointed out that the SAS program is not 
yet available for the DEC alpha.

    item 2.7  Susan stated that Eric Boyd will talk to Margaret Hendley 
about the keying arrangements for room 222.  Benny Colussi will get back 
to Susan about what is decided.

    item 2.7 Albert reported that there is still no decision on the 
computer equipment for room 222.  He has advertisements for Dell and IBM 
machines.  He will discuss the situation with Carl Nagel.

3. Additional Agenda
    7. CAPDU-L

4. CANSIM/EPAS
    Bill stated that he has not heard from Andrea Chappell about secure 
telnet access; he will find out from her what priority she can give to 
this project.  Doug is receiving requests from patrons for CANSIM data 
and is anxious to make this data available to the public as soon as 
possible.  Susan mentioned that she has information about a CANSIM CD-ROM 
product which costs $995 per year and is updated annually.  It was 
pointed out that there could be overlap with the EPAS service and that we 
would need to know more about the output formats.  Straight text files 
can easily be imported into spreadsheets and programs such as SysStat.

5. Census and GSS
    Albert reported that he will have to send 17 tapes to Laine Ruus in 
order to obtain the missing census files. Carol indicated that DCS has 30 tapes 
in stock and each costs only about $8.00; she will talk to Paul Dirksen 
about making 17 of these available to the Library.

    Albert is still searching for a copy of the missing GSS codebook.  
Bob Ellsworth at WLU has asked Albert to help him get their missing GSS 
and VAW files.  It was pointed out that WLU is not a GSS-consortium 
member and therefore is not licenced to use consortium data.  The VAW 
data is still available from the source.

6. CANSIM training
    Doug gave a demonstration of the EPAS software and CANSIM data.  The 
path on library to CANSIM is as follows:
  /fsys2/cansim/db/bin/cansim
Albert will talk to Chris Leowski about how to issue local commands to 
acquire CANSIM updates.  Bill will investigate how the print command is 
compiled.  We want to be able to define lpr at the library account level 
but not the public account level.

7. CAPDU-L
    Albert reported on several recent CAPDU-L messages which pertained
to the census.  A number of issues arose from this report.  Laine Ruus is 
working on a Canadian standard for describing datasets; Bill suggested we 
tell her about the recently released US government standard.  Albert 
mentioned that the University of Alberta's Data Library gopher provides 
outdated information about the situation at UW; for example, there is an 
entry for the Leisure Studies Data Bank and DRC. Univ. of Alberta should be 
pointing to documents at UW.  Doug will speak with Chuck Humphries at 
Alberta about this.  Bill suggested that it would be useful if we contacted 
other institutions to find out whether they have created Web documents 
describing datasets that we have as well; we could then link to these 
documents.  Albert will follow up on this and will mention to these 
institutions that in return we can provide the CANSIM manual.
  
   Shabiran agreed to add a sentence to the About EDS section on gopher 
stating that the Library is a member of various consortia for the 
acquisition of electronic data.  Shabiran also agreed to organize the 
gopher structure for the VAW dataset.