Information Standards for Human Rights Violations Classification and Reporting

There is an interesting article in the most recent issue of Progressive Librarian about HURIDOCS, the Geneva-based Human Rights Information and Documentation Systems.

HURIDOCS focuses on providing training for information and human rights workers who require techniques for the collection, organization and classification, preservation, and management of human rights abuse information.

Tools include training materials for indexing and thesaurus building, standardized formats for the exchange of bibliographic information and metadata about human rights, proposed methodologies for monitoring and reporting abuses (standard ways of describing events, victims, acts, identities of perpetrators), etc.

An earlier Library Boy post covered a related topic: the use of computer databases and statistical analysis by the Human Rights Data Analysis Group to create objective "evidence-based" accounts of patterns of human rights violations (Computer Geeks Track Human Rights Abuses, Feb. 14, 2006).