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What is forced migration?

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

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What is forced migration?

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  1. Creating electronic resources for the study of forced migration: a researcher's perspectiveMarilyn DeeganRefugee Studies CentreUniversity of Oxford

  2. 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

  3. 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

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

  5. 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

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

  7. 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

  8. 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

  9. 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

  10. 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

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

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

  13. 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

  14. 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

  15. 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

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

  17. 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

  18. 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

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