Collaborative Tools

Collaborative Tools for the training for UNICs reference assistants.

Wikipedia: http://wikipedia.org/

UN Pulse: http://www.un.org/Depts/dhl/unpulse/

Social Bookmarking: http://del.icio.us/dhlreference

Netvibes: http://www.netvibes.com/unlegallibrary

Internal Resources (iSeek)

Dag blog: http://unhq-appsdev-cs01/LIB/DagBlog.nsf/

Training Materials: http://iseek.un.org/webpgdept937_3.asp?dept=937

Geneva Wiki: http://lib-100734.unog.un.org/unsgwiki/doku.php?id=start

Showing Kathy blogs

This is how you post something

Can documents be sexy?

To get funding, often things need to be “sexy”– i.e., packaged to best seduce the decision makers.

Documents, of all kinds, but UN documents are not very sexy: rather dry to read in general, and verging on the deliberately obscure in the worst cases.

But in terms of primary source material, they can’t be beat.

Forget reports for a moment, and just think of the thousands of letters from every country on every topic. This is amazing: a record of the issues any country wished to raise to the international community for the last 60-odd years. And translated into languages.

But the presentation of the content: tucked away in databases, stuck in pdf format, complex metadata that is painstakingly hand-crafted, but unique and non-standard.

Think of all the work: the researchers and report writers, the translators, the delegates who read, the librarians who classify– all that work hidden away and never presented as the very livelihood of the organization.

How would Madison Avenue deal with it?

stories

The phrase “institutional memory” keeps coming up.

How can we tell the story of the library’s role in keeping the institutional memory alive?

More about UN documents

Does researching get more complicated than this?

An example:

Researching the New York headquarters child care centre, I found a resolution, Questions relating to the programme budget for the biennium 1980-1981 (A/RES/35/217: UNBISnet link).

Section XX, “Establishment of a Child-care centre at Headquarters,” says:

1. Takes note of the report of the Secretary-General on the establishment of a child-care centre at Headquarters [footnote 76];
2. Requests the Secretary-General to submit to the General Assembly at its thirty-sixth session a new study on the establishment of a child-care centre at Headquarters, taking into account the recommendations of the Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions [footnote 77] and the comments and observations made by delegations during the consideration of this subject by the Fifth Committee at the current session [footnote 78];

Other than requesting another report, this resolution doesn’t say much.

It refers to other documents: reports of the SG and ACABQ and 5th Committee meeting records.

In order to learn about this discussion, it is necessary to read these other documents.

“Takes note of” is officially recognized to not indicate a recommendation in resolutions. So even if you find the reports, you will need to look at subsequent years to find out how it was decided to open a day care centre (since we know it was opened and is still running).

This resolution is available online, but is not full-text searchable. The other documents are not available online, but should be held in most depositories.

Even if it were searchable, the user needs to know that child-care is hyphenated in the document, that centre is spelled the British way and that even though this is a long document with only two mentions of child-care, this is the best result, because it will give you citations to the major related documents, which you can then look for.

Currently, a full-text search for the phrase /child-care centre/ in the ODS gives 11 results.

A search for /(”child-care centre” OR “day care” OR “child care” OR childcare OR daycare) AND headquarters/ gives 953 results. Add in the symbol A/RES for any General Assembly resolutions and there are 5 results.

In UNBISnet (the catalog, where subject searching is more possible), a search for Resolutions and the subject: “day care services” retrieves 15 results, including the resolution quoted above. But not other budget resolutions, where I think the information might be hiding.

I’m thinking about this in terms of searching full-text for documents when (if) we ever get everything from 1946 onward digitized. It would appear to be useful, but I’m wondering if it won’t create its own set of problems. I really need to do some research into textual analysis studies.

Musings about UN documents

The United Nations is a complex organization and the documentation reflects that complexity and then adds in some more of its own.

I’ve started a conversation in the library here about how we can start to think about making access to UN documents more reasonable. Our current tools are not adequate and there are plans afoot to digitize everything from the beginning (1946), which is a building full of paper (100s of millions of pages of documents in 6 languages). I haven’t any idea how we are going to find anything.

Thinking about this brings up so many issues.

One that I haven’t really thought much about and that may be unique to this sort of organization is that full-text searching may be of limited use because (disregarding the multi-lingual aspect of things for a moment) the vocabulary of our documents is very limited. We need the metadata to distinguish among these documents because of the repetition.

Because the organization discusses over and over again the same issues, with minor variations at each iteration, and because the language of diplomacy is inherently evasive, this might create special problems for full text searching.

No conclusions here, but I’ve been sitting on this post a while and will post and see if anything inspirational happens while I’m away on vacation.  Happy summer to anyone who happens across this quiet little blog.

Commission on Sustainable Development

We did a briefing for delegates to the Commission on Sustainable Development a few weeks ago. Here’s the list of Useful Links from the presentation:

UN Website: http://www.un.org/

Issues on the UN Agenda: http://www.un.org/issues/

Issues on the UN Agenda: Sustainable Development:

http://www.un.org/issues/m-susdev.html

Commission on Sustainable Development Web site:

http://www.un.org/esa/sustdev/csd/policy.htm

Division for Sustainable Development:

http://www.un.org/esa/sustdev/index.html

 

UN Documentation Centre: http://www.un.org/documents/

UN-I-QUE: http://lib-unique.un.org/lib/unique.nsf

 

UN-I-QUE record for the Report of the CSD:

http://lib-unique.un.org/lib/unique.nsf/link/R00396

 

Official Document System: http://documents.un.org

 

United Nations Documentation Research Guide:

http://www.un.org/Depts/dhl/resguide

 

Journal of the United Nations:

http://www.un.org/Docs/journal/En/lateste.pdf

 

UN News Centre: http://www.un.org/news

UN Press Releases and Meetings Coverage:

www.un.org/apps/pressreleases

Sustainable Development press release symbol: ENV/DEV

UN Webcast: http://www.un.org/webcast

UN Website Search: http://www.un.org/search/

 

UN Website Index: http://www.un.org/site_index/

 

UN system sites: http://www.un.org/aroundworld

Contact the DHLink (Dag Hammarskjöld Library and Knowledge Sharing Centre)  Reference Team:

http://www.un.org/depts/dhl/sendmail/contactform.asp

http://www.un.org/Depts/dhl/sendmail/sendemail_unreference.asp

Free Internet Databases

 

15 sites in 15 minutes: Free Internet Databases

This quick seminar will show you a selection of databases for research.

1. Google Scholar: http://scholar.google.com/
2. Librarians Internet Index: http://lii.org/
3. Internet Public Library: http://www.ipl.org/
4. Intute: http://www.intute.ac.uk/
5. INFOMINE: http://infomine.ucr.edu/
6. Social Science Research Network: http://www.ssrn.com/
7. Internet Archive: http://www.archive.org/index.php
8. GuideStar: http://www.guidestar.org/ and http://www.guidestar.org.uk/
9. Global Legal Information Network: http://www.glin.gov/
10. Jurist: http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/
11. GlobaLex: http://www.nyulawglobal.org/globalex/
12. SIPRI (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute): http://www.sipri.org/
13. ERIC (Education Resources Information Center): http://www.eric.ed.gov/
14. PubMed: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?DB=pubmed
15. Main UN Databases: http://www.un.org/databases/index.html

Prepared by Susan Kurtas, Reference Librarian at United Nations Headquarters New York.

Course materials

I posted the course materials for my classes here directly from docs.google.com.

Pretty cool.

I’ll have to play with the display options. They look big because I increased the font to be visible from the back of the room when I am training.

Also, it didn’t include a link to the page where the document is published on the web.

News Resources: http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dc8xsd8t_27ccd65

Cool Web Tools: http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dc8xsd8t_0fc77q2&revision=_published

Anyway, not hard to do and pretty intuitive interaction between google and wordpress.

News Resources: 30 sites in 30 minutes

News Resources: 30 sites in 30 minutes

This seminar introduces a selection of the many excellent Web sites offering free news online.

Aggregate News Sites (many sources through one interface)

1. All Africa: http://allafrica.com/
2. Clusty news: http://news.clusty.com/
3. Drudge Report: http://www.drudgereport.com/
4. Google news: http://news.google.com/
5. News Now: http://newsnow.co.uk/
6. Topix.net: http://www.topix.net/
7. World news network: http://wn.com/
8. World Press: http://www.worldpress.org/
9. Yahoo news: http://news.yahoo.com/
10. $ News Library: http://www.newslibrary.com (search is free)
    

News Resource Guides (find a specific source online)

1. ABYZ News Links: http://www.abyznewslinks.com/
2. All you can read: http://www.allyoucanread.com/
3. Headline Spot: http://headlinespot.com/
4. Internet Public Library News Page: http://www.ipl.org/div/news/
5. Kidon Media Link: http://www.kidon.com/media-link/index.php
6. News Directory: http://www.newsdirectory.com/
7. News Link: http://newslink.org/
8. Online Newspapers: http://www.onlinenewspapers.com/
9. Radio Locator: http://www.radio-locator.com/
10. UNC Greensboro Library News and Newspapers Online: http://library.uncg.edu/news/

Cool things to do with the News

1. BBC Most Popular: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/live_stats/html/graph.stm
2. Buzztracker: http://www.buzztracker.org/
3. Mapped Up: http://www.mappedup.com/
4. News Cloud: http://www.newscloud.com/
5. News Map: http://www.marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/
6. News is Free (RSS Reader): http://www.newsisfree.com/
7. Newseum’s Today’s Front Pages: http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/flash/
8. Ten by Ten: http://www.tenbyten.org/10×10.html
9. Vanishing Point: http://www.low-fi.org.uk/vanishingpoint/
10. Week in Review: http://www.weekinreview.org/

15 December 2006 Susan Kurtas