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.