Creating electronic resources for the study of forced migration: a researcher's perspective Marilyn Deegan Refugee Studies Centre University of Oxford

What is forced migration? Unintended population movement through conflict, persecution, or developmental factors Refugees, internal displacement, development-induced displacement One of the world’s biggest human problems: there are around 25 million refugees and forced migrants

Forced Migration Online (FMO) A project to create a portal on forced migration Based at the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford Funding from Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the EU International partners

FMO Partners Refugee Studies Centre Czech Helsinki Committee, Prague Tufts University, USA Columbia University, USA Higher Education Digitisation Service

FMO Partners Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College London Information Centre on Asylum Seekers and Refugees, King’s College, London International network of editors and other contributors

FMO Audience Anyone who undertakes research or seeks information in this field –practitioners –students –information providers –policy makers –media –forced migrants –etc

The importance of information services Use of up-to-date, relevant, reliable information is of the greatest importance As is historical information At the Refugee Studies Centre, we are in direct contact with around 10,000 individuals and institutions at the moment We seek to increase this all the time

FMO Components A searchable catalogue with descriptions of relevant resources elsewhere on the web, cf. the RDN A digital library of full-text documents and journal articles Cross-searching agents Thematic and country-related research guides News sources

Digital Library c items of grey literature available end November 2001 (images and searchable full text) Some key journals in the field to be added at a later date New bids for further digital collections currently with the Mellon Foundation

Searchable Catalogue Will house bibliographic records that describe web-based and other resources Record fields include author, title, subject, date, description, URL, format, type, etc. –DC specification now available –also to be mapped to MARC

Types of resources Full-text documents Journals Library catalogues Discussion lists Bibliographies Statistical data Databases Teaching resources etc, etc

Location of the resources Libraries Educational institutions Governmental, inter-governmental and non-governmental organizations Various news sources A whole range of other worldwide sources

How do we find the resources? Various web and bibliographic searching techniques –visit trusted sources, eg. UNHCR –follow links –key word searching –recommendations – lists

Problems Research is time-consuming Validity of resources Granularity –sometimes we find whole sets of resources or catalogues and sometimes individual items –don’t always know what is in a resource until we dig around Currency of information

How would collection level description help us? Save time in giving us a description of a resource and its granularity Could help us to evaluate the validity of the resource A standard, well-constructed point of reference would allow us to compare different resources better

How would collection level description help us? Linguistic issues –descriptions could be provided in a number of languages

Potential problems Our diverse community Persuading organizations outside HE and the libraries community to adopt collection level descriptions Issues outside the developed world Language problems Quality control –especially given the geographic and linguistic spread of our community

What we need Help in defining a range of catalogue description models that we could apply to our diverse subject area Help in training our international partners in applying collection level descriptions