Save the Children Resource Libraries: Aligning Internal Technical Resource Libraries with a Public Distribution Website

Save the Children (STC) is an international NGO that promotes children's rights, provides relief and helps support children across the globe. With international headquarters in London, STC has 30 national members and supports local partners operating in over 100 countries worldwide. STC International maintains technical infrastructures that are available to members and local partners including SharePoint, Drupal and other information management applications. An effort to specify and implement a common resource library for curating and sharing internal technical resources has been underway since November 2015. This has included an inventory of existing (but heterogeneous) resource libraries on Save the Children’s work in the thematic area of Health and Nutrition, and agreement on a common metadata specification and some controlled vocabularies to be used going forward. This internal technical resource library has been aligned with Save the Children’s Resource Centre, a public web-accessible library that hosts comprehensive, reliable and up-to-date information on Save the Children's work in the thematic areas of Child Protection, Child Rights Governance and Child Poverty.

The goal is to make it easy for content curators to identify items in the internal technical resource library, and to publish them to the public Resource Centre with a minimum transformation of metadata required. This presentation will discuss how this project has reached consensus on how to accommodate and balance internal research and external communication requirements by developing a light-weight application profile.

Joseph Busch is the Founder and Principal Consultant at Taxonomy Strategies. For the past 14 years Taxonomy Strategies has been guiding organizations such as Deloitte, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in developing frameworks that help improve information capture, preservation, search, retrieval, and governance. Mr. Busch has just started a new company called Semantic Staffing, a recruiting service for information management professionals.

Before founding Taxonomy Strategies Joseph Busch was:

• Vice President for Infoware at Metacode Technologies which was an early developer of commercial semantic technology applications based on latent semantic indexing (LSI) and other methods. Metacode was acquired by Interwoven in 2000.
• The Getty's Program Manager for Standards and Research Databases, including the Getty Vocabulary Program from 1993-98. The Getty began publishing the vocabulary resources as linked open data in 2014.

Mr. Busch is a past President of the Association for Information Science and Technology, and past member of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative Executive Committee.

Branka Kosovac is a Taxonomy Strategies associate and Principal of dotWit Consulting. She develops and implements complex taxonomies in a variety of business and technical contexts for Fortune 100 companies, international organizations, government agencies and mid-size enterprises across North America and the European Union such as Microsoft Corporation, Canadian National Research Council, Ford Foundation, and United Nations Development Program. Branka has mentored numerous taxonomy consultants, developed methodologies, established the taxonomy practice for larger consulting companies, and taught as an Adjunct Professor at the University of British Columbia.