Creating electronic resources for the study of
forced migration: a researcher's perspective
Marilyn DeeganRefugee 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. 3000 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– email 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