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Over the past 20 years, heritage inventories in Flanders (Belgium) have evolved from printed books to digital inventories. The purpose of this paper is to look at this evolution and highlight the interaction between the system and its users.

After a short introduction about the history of inventories in Flanders, this paper mainly concerns itself with the last decade. Discrete topics will be highlighted to show the effects of the interaction that has taken place.

It is obvious that a system that publishes a digital inventory needs to adapt to the user requirements. But, after years of working with a digital inventory system, it has become apparent that not only has the system been developed to the users’ needs, but also that user practice and the resulting data have been shaped by the system. Seeing data projected on a common basemap has led researchers to realise how intertwined and interdependent different types of heritage can be and how much their respective methodologies can benefit from more interaction. It has become apparent that data quality is of the utmost importance, something that can only be guaranteed by data entry standards, validation tools, and a strict editing workflow. The systems that are being developed are not expected to live on forever, but the data in them is.

This paper presents real-life use cases and practical applications of building and maintaining a large digital inventory system over the years and through changes in organisational structure and focus. It provides insights that are hard to ascertain from smaller projects due to the volumes of data that are handled.

This brief history of the International Study Association on Teachers and Teaching (ISATT) documents developments and trends during the decade 2013–2023. To situate recent ISATT history, we begin with an overview of the association's first 30 years (1983–2012). The dominant theme of those early years was developing ISATT as a recognized and influential professional organization connecting researchers on teaching and teacher education from a growing list of nations and regions of the world. During the most recent decade, there has been a concerted effort toward broad internationalization through biennial conferences and regional meetings, and a growing network of national representatives from across the world. Also, the ISATT journal, Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, the journal, which began in 1995, has published hundreds of peer-reviewed articles written by more than 1000 authors and coauthors, contributing to a growing body of knowledge about teaching and teacher education in many cultures. In the last 20 years and especially in the past 10, the locations of ISATT meetings have become significantly more diverse, following a trend of greater internationalization compared with ISATT's European and North American beginnings. At the same time, the number of ISATT members remains stable and small thereby preserving a collegial and collaborative tone in our exchanges. In sum, ISATT's recent decade finds the association intellectually healthy, successful in managing the challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic, and enriched by the proliferation of multinational points of view and styles of research.