Musings about UN documents
July 12, 2007
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.
