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