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.

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.

23 Things: The Ninth Tool = Custom Search

There are a number of tools available that allow you to build your own customized search engine. I posted about this earlier. I also built my own search engine using Google's Custom Search. It just searches refugee and forced migration blogs. You can also check out Humanitarian Drive (searches humanitarian web sites) and Forced Migration Search (searches refugee and forced migration web sites).

MSF Field Research Site

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has made its field research available at a new site. Published research and commentary can be accessed topically (for example, "emergencies/refugees"), or by title, author or journal. A separate section houses conference abstracts. Visitors can subscribe to the RSS feed in order to keep track of new additions to the site.

Building your own search engine

Building your own search engine sounds like it would be a highly technical, and therefore difficult task. But it isn't! There are a number of tools available that allow you to customize a search engine with a few clicks of the mouse. Effectively, this means that you can select the web sites you feel are the most important for your work, and run searches just on those pages.

Here are two examples of custom-built search engines (both used Google's application):

Forced Migration Search Engine
The Humanitarian Drive

And this article describes a number of online tools that you can use to create your own engine: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue55/search-engines/

New Technologies and Humanitarian Response

Bloggers, Buzz and Sound Bites: Innovative Media Approaches to Humanitarian Response(Brookings-Bern Project on Internal Displacement, Nov. 2007)
- Summary of discussions during a seminar that focused on how humanitarian organizations and media outlets are using new technologies to raise awareness and mobilize humanitarian response.

RSS Feeds for International Organizations

Here's a listing of RSS feeds available for United Nations agencies and other international/regional organizations involved in humanitarian and development work. Subscribing to one of these feeds will help you to keep up with an organization's news and activities.

(Note: If an organization is not listed, it is most likely because it does not currently offer any feeds.)

European Union [feeds]
- Available for press releases and speeches.

FAO [feed]
- Latest news.

ICRC [feed]
- Latest news.

IOM [feed]
- Latest news.

OAS [feeds]
- Available for latest news, press releases, photos, videos, webcast, and speeches.

OECD [feeds]
- Available for countries, topics and OECD Departments.

OSCE [feeds]
- Available for news and features.

UN News Centre [feeds]
- Topical and geographical.

UN Pulse Blog [access] [feed]
- Provides announcements of new UN information online.

UN.GIFT (Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking) [feed]
- Latest news.

UNFPA [feeds]
-Available for news and publications.

UNHCR [feed]
- Latest news.

UNICEF [feeds]
- Available for news and photo essays.

UNIFEM [feeds]
- Available for latest news, resources and job vacancies.

WFP [feeds]
- Available for news, press releases, photos, emergency reports, and videos.

WHO [feeds]
- Available for news, speeches and latest disease outbreaks.

World Bank [feeds]
- Available for regions and countries.