Janet Haven: Human rights search tool launches

Hurisearch, the human rights search tool built by HURIDOCS in collaboration with Fast, is launching today. (Note that the Beeb got the date wrong -- Human Rights Day is December 10th, but the search portal's launch is, in fact, right now.) Huridocs deveoped Hurisearch as a tool to index the contents of 3000-odd human rights websites around the world. I've played with the tool, and it has impressive search functionality -- an amazing number of languages, categories, document types can be searched. Not surprisingly, the tools works best indexing websites built using a metadata standard like Dublin Core - which is, unfortunately, not something that all human rights websites or archives have integrated. Recently, I've talked with a number of people in the human rights community about the need for better webmaster training in using content management systems, search engine optimization and metadata structures, and self-publishing tools -- many human rights websites that emerge from developing or transitional countries, unless they are the product of well-funded organizations, are built in such a way that the staff can't use them to publish information, and the information that is published by an overworked webmaster is not easily indexed by tools like Hurisearch. Hm, Webmasters Without Borders, anyone? (Credit to Elijah for that idea.)