23 Things: The Second Tool = Social Bookmarks

The second tool discussed in the 23 Things program was del.icio.us. This service allows you to bookmark web sites/pages so that you have access to them from any computer. (As opposed to when you bookmark sites using Internet Explorer or another browser, you only have access to them from that individual computer.) del.icio.us is referred to as a social bookmarking site because you can also share your bookmarks with everyone or a selected audience. Moreover, you can search everyone's bookmarks and discover new resources. Finally, you can tag (i.e., provide a descriptive term for) the sites that you bookmark, and you can explore other people's bookmarks via their tags.

I can imagine using a bookmark tool like del.icio.us for very specific projects, like gathering bookmarks to respond to a particular reference query or when surveying what's available on a certain topic. See, for example, the list of bookmarks for forced migration-related working papers that I set up.

EADI's approach is to use del.icio.us for current awareness purposes. It bookmarks new publications and projects, adds a note indicating the publication date, publisher, and author, and tags each for inclusion with a series of topical categories. Plus users can subscribe to RSS feeds (these will be addressed in a later post) by topical category to be notified of new bookmarks. See EADI's migration and peace/conflict bookmarks.

Other forced migration/humanitarian sites have created more general lists, for resources they find useful or of interest. Examples include Paul Dudman's bookmarks (for the Refugee Archives at UEL) and Paul Currion's bookmarks (see his humanitarian.info blog).

Some organizations have jumped on the social bookmarking bandwagon simply by making it easier for visitors to create bookmarks for pages on their web sites. For instance, ICRC includes social bookmarking links on all news, article, information and other resource-specific pages.

Social bookmarking tools that are more geared to research and academics are on offer from CiteULike and Connotea. These services allow you to bookmark journal articles and scholarly papers. They extract the bibliographic details for citation purposes; all you have to do is add tags. And you can share your library of articles as well as check out other people's saved articles.

23 Things: The First Tool = Blogs

I have signed up to participate in the 23 Things program developed by the Special Libraries Association (SLA). This is a self-paced program designed to teach information professionals about the various Web 2.0 tools that exist and how we can use them in our work. I will use this blog to report on my progress and to promote the application of these tools in a forced migration context. And hopefully, in the process, some readers of this blog will discover something new and innovative that they can use themselves!

I created this blog over a year ago and in one of my first posts, I described what a blog is and its utility. You can read that post here. Over time, quite a few more blogs have been established in the forced migration and humanitarian sectors. Here are some examples:

AidBlogs [access]
- Aggregation of posts from humanitarian aid workers' blogs.

Forced Migration Current Awareness Blog [access]
- My first blog! A current awareness service highlighting web research and information relating to refugees, IDPs and forced migration.

Forced Migration Online: Blog [access]
- Reports on new additions and developments relating to the Forced Migration Online web site.

Freedom of Movement [access]
- Commentary on immigration and asylum law by a UK barrister.

Poliblog [access]
- The British Refugee Council's blog.

RefBlog [access]
- Comment, analysis and current awareness from the Information Centre about Refugees and Asylum in the UK (ICAR).

Refugee Studies Current Awareness Blog [access]
- Blog established to support the MA in refugee studies program at the University of East London (UEL).

Seeking Asylum from the Mainstream [access]
- Commentary on forced migration, asylum, civic engagement and the welfare of young people, from a graduate of the Refugee Studies Centre's forced migration master's program.

World Bridge [access]
- Refugees International's blog.

Celebrating Open Access Day Belatedly

So I'm only a month late! October 14th was the first Open Access Day, and I just learned about it! The aim of the day was to increase awareness and understanding of Open Access (OA) as both a principle and a movement, and of what OA proponents are hoping to accomplish.

OA literature is defined as "...digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions." (For more information, see A Very Brief Introduction to Open Access, by Peter Suber.) As I described in a previous post, two types of delivery mechanisms have been developed to facilitate greater access to research literature: open access journals and open access archives or repositories. A variety of resources have been developed to make it easier to locate both of these literature types. For example, this listing from the British Columbia Electronic Library Network compiles peer-reviewed scholarly journal collections and freely available serials. And openDOAR serves as a searchable directory of open access repositories.

In the forced migration context, it is not clear to what extent different literature types fall into the Open Access category, as defined above. What *is* clear is that many documents are openly accessible; that is, they are online and freely available. I recently conducted a survey of the reference materials included in my forced migration research guide. Of the 313 examined, 67% were available online, free of charge.

Breaking these 313 items down by type of document--journal article, publication with ISBN/ISSN, or unpublished report, I found that roughly equal numbers of each are represented: 33% journal articles, 31% published items, and 36% unpublished reports (grey literature). Of the journal articles, only 42% were freely available online, compared with 89% of reports. This would seem to be consistent with trends in other disciplines, i.e., scholarly journals tend to charge access fees, while grey literature reports are disseminated at no cost through the web sites of those who produce them. Interestingly, though, 67% of the books and other published items were also online, free of charge. This may be explained in part by the fact that a number of international organizations are involved in forced migration issues, and they tend to make most of their publications, even published ones, freely available online.

For now, it seems that forced migration researchers have ready access to a decent amount of information online. Unfortunately, there is no way to know other than to look, and keep your fingers crossed! Perhaps one outcome of the trend towards Open Access will be more reliable expectations about knowing what we can find online, free of charge, versus hoping what we might find.

Audiovisual Library of International Law

The UN Office of Legal Affairs recently launched an audiovisual library of international law. The cornerstone of the library is a lecture series that covers most international law subjects. Currently, under "International Migration Law," visitors will find two lectures by Guy Goodwin-Gill, entitled respectively "International Migration Law: An Introduction" and "Forced Migration - The Evolution of International Refugee Law and Organization." Two additional lectures by Prof. Goodwin-Gill are forthcoming. Other forthcoming relevant lectures will be presented by Jan Egeland and Margareta Wahlström on disaster relief and Walter Kälin on IDPs, among others.

The library also offers an "Historic Archives" section, that includes an entry for "refugees and stateless persons." There, visitors will find an introductory note by Prof. Goodwin-Gill on the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol, which includes a procedural history, links to related documents, and information on the instruments' status. Two additional introductions will be made available on the two conventions relating to statelessness and stateless persons.

Update to Open Access Post

In September, I undertook a not particularly representative survey of 17 forced migration journals to determine their open access status. An additional title can be added to the "delayed open access" group -- Intervention: International Journal of Mental Health, Psychosocial Work and Counselling in Areas of Armed Conflict -- since it makes its content available in full roughly 12 months after publication.

Google Book Search Settlement Agreement

The New York Times reported yesterday that Google had reached a settlement with publishers and authors over content that it displays from millions of scanned texts in its Google Book search service.

"Under the agreement, Google will now show up to 20 percent of the text at no charge to users. It will also make the entire book available online for a fee. Universities, libraries and other organizations will be able to buy subscriptions that make entire collections of those books available to their visitors."

More information about the future of Google Book search is provided on Google's settlement agreement page.

Keeping Up with Blogs through Google

Google recently relaunched an upgraded version of its Blog Search. If you want to track what blogs are saying about a certain issue, conflict, or other topic, run a search, then scroll to the bottom of the results page. There, you will find options to create an email alert or subscribe to an RSS feed for those results.