The next meeting of the IPY Data Policy and Management Subcommittee will be held in Quebec City on 23 October. This is just prior to the next meeting of the ICSU/WMO Joint Committee (JC). Correspondingly, there will be a joint information session between members of the Data Committee and the JC on the 24th.

A tentative agenda for the Data Committee meeting is to

1) Develop a recommended digital archiving strategy. We will discuss possible additional criteria to be an IPY repository. We will also consider how we can encourage national governments to sustain preservation of and access to IPY data. We want to avoid the situation of the first two IPYs where much of the data were lost, and we need to extend beyond the WDC system developed under IGY.

2) Determine key criteria and basic content for an IPY Data flyer/ brochure/recipe. NSIDC can produce something attractive and readable, but we need to figure out what we are going to say.

3) Develop a plan for a broad IPY Data Workshop at the big IPY meeting in St Petersburg next summer.

Topics for the information session with the JC have not yet been determined.

The Data Committee welcomes feedback on these topics as well as suggestion for other agenda items.

-m.