Attention!

This blog is no longer being updated. For information on and resources relating to refugees and forced migration, please visit Forced Migration Current Awareness. Thanks!

Searching within a Book

Here's a tip: If a book does not have a subject index, try searching for it in Google Books. If it has been indexed by Google Books, then you can search within the text of the book. The search results will point you to page numbers on which your search term appears, effectively serving as an index. I did this recently with Acquisition and Loss of Nationality, Vol. 1: Comparative Analyses, a 499- page book with no index. I had the book in hand but I wasn't inclined to read the entire text in order to locate references to "statelessness"!

Amazon.com offers a similar "search inside this book" feature; here's a link to the same book for comparative purposes.

Two UNHCR blogs

UNHCR's Policy Development and Evaluation Service (PDES) has started a blog that focuses on "Witchcraft, Displacement and Human Rights." It shares news reports and related research studies on witchcraft allegations and their impact. The RSS feed is available here.

A second blog was started in tandem with the 2009 evaluation of UNHCR’s Age, Gender and Diversity Mainstreaming (AGDM) strategy. Called "It Begins with Me. It Begins with You. It Begins with Us. Thoughts and Actions Around Age, Gender and Diversity Mainstreaming," its purpose is described as follows: To "encourage thinking, dialogue and action around the challenges and rewards of AGDM. You’ll find the mission, methodology and the milestones of the ongoing AGDM evaluation as well as posts about films, audio, books, paintings, programs, partners, news, op-eds… anything that helps add to our greater understanding of AGDM." The RSS feed can be accessed here.

New Journal Articles: Alerts and Full-text Retrieval

I've added a new journal articles feature to the sidebar of my other blog. It works like this: As I come across articles of interest, I bookmark them in Delicious and add the tag "newjournalarticles." Each time this occurs, the list of article titles in the sidebar updates accordingly. So whenever you visit the blog, be sure to check the list for any new titles of interest.

If you forget to check, you can always 1) click on the link to go to the bookmarked titles in Delicious, or 2) subscribe to the RSS feed for the listing and peruse the updates at your leisure in your own newsreader.

One thing to note is that these journal articles are not necessarily available in full-text online. To retrieve the full-text, you have several options:

- purchase the individual article
- sign up for a free online trial for the journal you are interested in (for example, Sage Journals is offering free access to all of its journals during April)
- search Worldcat.org for libraries that subscribe to a particular journal; enter your postal or zip code to determine which library is closest to you, and retrieve the text from that library
- if you are based in a developing country, you might have access to full-text journals through one of these initiatives: Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL); GDN Journal Services; HINARI Access to Research Initiative; JSTOR Developing Nations Initiative.

Finally, it's always worth searching online for keywords in the title of journal article you are seeking. Why?
- Sometimes journal publishers designate specific issues as free online samples: see, e.g., "A Heterotopian Analysis of Maritime Refugee Incidents," abstracted in IngentaConnect, but available at no cost by Wiley InterScience.
- Some articles are posted online in openly accessible journals: see, e.g., "The humanitarian consequences and actions in the Eastern Mediterranean Region over the last 60 years – a health perspective", which was indexed in PubMed.
- Some articles are available as preprints or conference papers: see, e.g, the abstract for "Resettling Refugees in Rural and Regional Australia: Learning from Recent Policy and Program Initiatives"; a report with a slightly different title but with the same authors was published earlier.

Wiki Article

I presented my forced migration wiki as a case study for an article in Library Hi Tech News. See "Using a Wiki to Publish a Research Guide" for more details.

FMO Podcast

A new podcast from Forced Migration Online (FMO): "Obama’s policy challenges and the future of US immigration." You can listen to it online or download it.

FMO on Delicious

Forced Migration Online (FMO) has started two sets of delicious bookmarks, one for new documents added to its digital library and the other for RSC working papers. As I've mentioned before, the handy thing about delicious is that it offers RSS feeds for tags created to describe one's bookmarks. So users can subscribe to feeds for both the aforementioned bookmark lists, here and here. Very handy for keeping up-to-date on FMO content.

Social Media Consultancy

UNHCR is advertising for a social media consultant, someone with "experience in the field of Social Networking and Web 2.0 interactive platforms such as Facebook, MySpace, Google Earth, YouTube, Flickr and Twitter."

The closing date for applications is 20 March.

ISCRAM 2009

The 2009 meeting of the International Community on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM) will be held in Göteborg, Sweden, 10-13 May 2009. While the window for submitting CFPs for the general programme is closed, several other opportunities for contribution are still available, including:

- a PhD colloquium (deadline 10 March)
- a student poster session (deadline 10 March)
- a pre-conference workshop on mobile information technology for emergency response (deadline 20 March)
- a practitioners' workshop (deadline 2 April)

Papers and presentations from the 2008 and 2007 ISCRAM proceedings are available on the conference site.

Peace Palace Library RSS Feeds

The Peace Palace Library has expanded its offerings of RSS feeds:

- If you would like to be kept up to date about new additions to the library's collection, you can subscribe to keyword feeds (e.g., Refugees and displaced persons, Human trafficking, Humanitarian assistance, etc.). Any time a record for a new journal article, book chapter, report or book that includes one of your keywords is added to the catalogue, your feed will be updated.

- You can also subscribe to a journal feed to be alerted when a new issue of a journal is received by the library.

- If you prefer to be notified of new tables of contents for individual journals that you specify, you can do so from the journal TOC page.

- You can even conduct a search across journal articles and then create a custom RSS feed for those results. Choices include searching on the journal title, the article title or the author.

Finding Theses & Dissertations

(I posted this on my other blog, but thought it would be good to share here as well.)

A number of projects are under way to digitize theses and dissertations and make them openly available to the wider online community and/or to establish a central access point for these important research materials. Here are some examples of both national and regional efforts:

Australasian Digital Theses Program [access]
- Provides access to both digitized theses and bibliographic information about non-digitized theses.

British Library EthOS [access]
- Aim is "[t]o offer a 'single point of access' where researchers the world over can access ALL theses produced by UK Higher Education." A list of participating institutions is provided on the site. Some full-texts are available at no charge. Free registration required.

DART-Europe E-theses Portal [access]
- Aim is to "encourage the creation, discovery and use of European e-theses." Most texts appear to be available in full at no charge.

Database of African Theses and Dissertations [access]
- Free registration required to search bibliographic database with information on theses and dissertations completed at African universities.

Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations [access]
- NDLTD is "an international organization dedicated to promoting the adoption, creation, use, dissemination and preservation of electronic analogues to the traditional paper-based theses and dissertations." Access above is provided via the VTLS Visualizer, a search and discovery system. Other systems available for searching the same collection can be found here.

Theses Canada Portal/Portail de Theses Canada [access]
- Provides access to bibliographic records for theses and if available, electronic texts.

New FMO Podcast

The latest podcast from the Forced Migration Online (FMO) team focuses on Kurdish forced migration in Turkey. Visitors can listen to the episode online or download it.

Other podcasts are available here.

Monitoring legal journal articles

Some time ago, I posted a note on "monitoring journal-reported research" via, among other strategies, generating custom RSS feeds. One journal service that has added this feature since the time that I wrote that earlier post is Current Law Journal Content.

How it works: Conduct a search; the search results page will then display a "feed version of search" link that you can subscribe to in order to be alerted when future results occur that match your search criteria. That's it!

Google Alerts

I have posted in the past on strategies for keeping up with web-based resources. One strategy I mentioned was using Google Alerts to monitor online developments for you. If you have a Google account, you can set up an alert to look for designated keywords in news articles, blog posts, web pages, videos, Google groups, or a combination of news, blogs, and web pages. Results (or matches to your search terms) can be delivered in the form of an email or an RSS feed.

I use a series of alerts to check for literature reviews and bibliographies to include in my forced migration research guide. I've found that while Google often finds resources I'm already aware of or that are already in my guide, every now and then, it will locate something a bit more obscure.

For more information, check out this FAQ.

WebCast: Humanitarian Studies Conference

The first World Conference on Humanitarian Studies begins Wednesday, February 4, in Groningen, The Netherlands. Happily, those of us who cannot attend will still be able to view live broadcasts through a streaming service provided by the university. The service is only supported by Internet Explorer, though, not Firefox and other browsers. Worth trying out though.

Updating the Forced Migration Research Guide

I recently made available an RSS feed to let users know what resources had been newly added to my forced migration research guide. To supplement this, I have also added a link and RSS feed to my del.icio.us bookmarks for pending resources that I plan to add to the guide when time permits! This helps me to keep track of things, and it allows readers to access relevant reference and research materials in the interim.

More Gaza Social Media Resources

An addendum to yesterday's post: Intute: Social Sciences listed various sites for monitoring news and developments in Gaza, and highlighted a posting on the Mashable blog on "How to Track the Israel Gaza Conflict Using Social Media" (the comments list additional links).

Gaza Situation

Here are various examples of how social media and Web 2.0 applications are being used to report on events in Gaza and to provide support to humanitarian efforts there.

Blogs:
- National Public Radio (NPR) recently reported on "Life must go on in Gaza and Sderot," a blog maintained by an Israeli (Hopeman) and a Palestinian (Peaceman) on opposite sides of the border.

Mapping:
- Aid Worker Daily reported on the OpenStreetMap Gaza Wiki project to "update routes within Gaza in an effort to provide better data sets for humanitarian groups."

RSS feed:
- You can subscribe to an RSS feed for all ReliefWeb updates on the situation in Gaza.

Tracking events:
- Change.org's Humanitarian Relief blog reported that Al-Jazeera is using Ushahidi to track attacks, casualties, and other developments on the ground.

Twitter:
- NPR also reported on the use of Twitter by Al-Jazeera and the Irsraeli government.

Podcast: Instant Guide to Refugees

The Forced Migration Online Blog reported today that the BBC Radio World Service, as part of its Instant Guide series, has made a podcast available on the refugee situation. A number of experts are interviewed, including the director of the Refugee Studies Centre (RSC). You can listen to the podcast via the FMO Blog, or download it from the BBC.

ReliefWeb's RSS Feeds

ReliefWeb has offered RSS feeds for some time, but their list keeps growing. They've added a feed for their "Policies & Issues" library, which is very helpful for tracking research reports. And they now also offer the chance to create feeds based on search results. Follow the instructions provided on their feed page, and find out what else you can subscribe to.