HURISEARCH Human Rights Search Engine
Date of Review: 26 July, 2005

Source: The Charleston Advisor / October 2005 http://www.charlestonco.com

Composite Score: 3/4

Reviewed by: Susan Maret
Adjunct Professor, Library and Information Science Program
Wesley Hall
University of Denver
2135 E. Wesley, Suite 103
Denver, CO. 80208
smaret@du.edu

PRICING OPTIONS

HURISEARCH Similar feature offers an explanation in terms of "similarity vector conditions" - language novice searchers may not have encountered. One area of HURISEARCH that requires specific improvement is the development of Help explanations written in a nontechnical manner and the inclusion of practical (HURI)search examples.

LANGUAGES AVAILABLE IN HURISEARCH

The following is a list of languages represented in HURISEARCH:

Afrikaans	Albanian	Arabic	Basque	Bulgarian	Byelorussian
Catalan	Chinese	Croatian	Czech	Danish	Dutch
English	Esperanto	Estonian	Faeroese	Farsi	Finnish
French	Frisian	Galician	German	Greek	Hebrew
Hungarian	Icelandic	Indonesian	Irish	Italian	Japanese
Korean	Latin	Lithuanian	Malay	Norwegian	Polish
Portuguese	Romanian	Russian	Serbian	Slovak	Slovenian
Spanish	Swahili	Swedish	Thai	Turkish	Ukrainian
Vietnamese	Welsh

HURISEARCH STATISTICS (COURTESY OF HURIDOCS)

Number of countries where sites are based - 122+
Number of pages indexed and crawled as of February, 2005 - 769,707
Number of languages used - over 50
Number of sites with reference to Hurisearch - 574
Number of sites with a direct link to Hurisearch - 125

SEARCHABILITY

HURISEARCH offers a simple search and exact phrase searching. Advanced searching features such as exact phrase, language (approximately fifty-eight), file type (text/HTML, application/PDF), file size and related word limiters are handily incorporated into the top level search page. While standard specific (database) search fields such author, date, title, peer- reviewed and full-text, and google - like features such as spelling correction and suggested spelling are not available, it is possible to use exact phrase searching and other limiters to create a more focused search of the human rights literature. Searches may also be easily narrowed to a specific language.

ADDITIONAL COMMENTS

HURIDOCS is currently in the process of expanding criteria for HURISEARCH site inclusion to include human rights material published by state / national human rights institutions that adhere to the 1993 National Institutions for the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights ("Paris Principles"), IGOs (intergovernmental organisations ) such as Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights, and so on, and to academic institutions that publish human rights materials. HURISEARCH is highly recommended for researchers, NGOs, and civil society members who have a primary interest in locating quality human rights information on the Web. As an added note, information professionals involved in human rights collections and reference work will benefit enormously from various HURIDOCS efforts as well.

NOTES

1. Power Point presentation of HURIDOCS tools at http://www. huridocs.org/tools/venice.ppt.
2. For discussion regarding vertical search engines, see: Vertical Search Wars at Blog Indeed.

CONTRACT PROVISIONS

N/A.

AUTHENTICATION

N/A.

AUTHOR'S SELECTED REFERENCES

FAST. HURIDOCS Deploys FAST Enterprise Search Plat form to Power Global Human Rights Network." Press Release, June 7, 2004.
HURIDOCS. What HURIDOCS Does
Vage, Lars. HURISEARCH--Specialized Search Engine for Human Rights. Pandia Search Engine Newsletter, 2004.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Susan Maret is currently adjunct professor at University of Denver, Library and Information Science Program. Dr. Maret holds a Ph.D. in Critical Information Studies from Union Institute and University, and a M.L.S. from University of Arizona. She has worked as a librarian in various special and academic libraries , including Auraria Library, University of Colorado, Penrose Library, University of Denver, Government Documents Department, Hayden Library, Arizona State University, and Noble Science and Engineering Library, Arizona State University. During fall-winter of 2004, Dr. Maret spent time at the HURIDOCS office in Versoix doing research on HURIDOCS human rights publications and services and their application to the reporting of various human rights violations.

CONTACT INFORMATION

HURIDOCS Secretariat (Human Rights Information and Documentation Systems, International)
48, chemin du Grand-Montfleury
CH-1290 Versoix, Switzerland
Phone: 41.22.7555252
Fax: 41.22.7555260
E-mail: info@HURIDOCS.org
URL: http://www.huridocs.org