Diana: A Human Rights Database

Abstract

There is a growing expectation among scholars from all disciplines that the resources of the world's research libraries be brought to the desktop. The complex universe of human rights literature invites both the electronic delivery of documentation to remote areas of the world and the imposition of order upon the burgeoning literature of this dynamic field. The technology that has been developed over the past several years has created new potential for organization, retrieval, and dissemination of that will facilitate the review of human rights literature. A consortium of law librarians, university-based human rights centers, and other non-governmental human rights organizations is undertaking an ambitious project combining the evolving information highway and the needs of human rights advocates and researchers around the world for timely, authoritative literature in their discipline. The project is titled DIANA in honor of Diana Vincent-Daviss (1943-1993),1 the former Librarian of Yale Law School and Deputy Director of the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law School. DIANA will promote the creation, organization, dissemination and preservation of primary and secondary electronic materials critical to human rights research. A prototype of DIANA currently exists on the Internet on a World Wide Web server at the University of Cincinnati College of Law.2 The prototype