Can documents be sexy?
December 27, 2007
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?
