This paper is part of an IASSIST Quarterly volume to honor the legacy of Sue A. Dodd. Sue identified the vacuum of library catalogue description for the new and growing area of machine-readable data (Dodd, 1979), and provided guidance for using a standard bibliographic format to fill this vacuum (Dodd, 1982). In following years she continued to communicate, discuss and elaborate upon the guidance. Some of the other papers in this collection in the IASSIST Quarterly (IQ) bring more focus to the writings of Sue Dodd and some papers elaborate on the work carried out within the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI). This paper sees the influence of Sue Dodd as her work was adapted and incorporated, highlighting some of the European work on the study description for social science data during the period 1975 to 1995.
