Home » post » Guide of the Week: Human Rights

Our mission

Free Government Information (FGI) is a place for initiating dialogue and building consensus among the various players (libraries, government agencies, non-profit organizations, researchers, journalists, etc.) who have a stake in the preservation of and perpetual free access to government information. FGI promotes free government information through collaboration, education, advocacy and research.

Guide of the Week: Human Rights

UC Berkeley contributed this annotated bibliography to the ALA GODORT Handout Wik:

Human Rights Resources (Univ. of California–Berkeley, 1999) Last updated 7/7/2006

It is separated into the following sections:

  • Encyclopedias, Guides, and Handbooks
  • Guides to Research
  • Document Sources
  • Directories
  • Bibliographies
  • Annuals
  • Library Catalogs
  • Periodicals Indexes/Databases
  • Periodicals
  • News Sources
  • Government Information
  • Internet Sources

Before I highlight specific resources, I wanted to give kudos to the UC Berkeley folks for including the “library catalogs” section and suggesting these terms for folks searching for human rights resources in library catalogs:

  • Censorship
  • Civil rights
  • Detention of persons
  • Dissenters
  • Government, resistance to
  • Human rights
  • Human rights workers
  • Political crimes and offenses
  • Political persecution
  • Political prisoners
  • Race discrimination
  • Refugees, political
  • Self-determination
  • Sex discrimination
  • Social justice
  • Torture

While controlled vocabulary *is* a wonderful concept and does a great job of tying related records together it is not always obvious what vocabulary to use. If we don’t highlight what to use, who will? Another good thing about the catalogs section is that UC Berkeley offers a tip on browsing human rights in the stacks — “Browse in the stacks for books on human rights in the call number range ‘JC571-628.'”

As for the resources themselves, they are drawn from a number of print and electronic resources. A tiny sample includes:

There is much, much more and you really ought to look at the rest of the guide. Then see what else is available. And if you’re a docs librarian with a guide, annotated bibliography or handout, then add it to the exchange.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.


Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Archives