Blog of Susan Kurtas

Collaborative Tools

Susan Kurtas — Tue, 13 May 2008 21:44:19 +0000

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

Susan Kurtas — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 12:56:43 +0000

This is how you post something

Can documents be sexy?

Susan Kurtas — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 17:50:20 +0000

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

Susan Kurtas — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 21:51:31 +0000

The phrase “institutional memory” keeps coming up.

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

Musings about UN documents

Susan Kurtas — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 21:23:03 +0000

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.