[Web4lib] Duplicating/overlapping resources for Katrina

[Richard Wiggins]

Karen,

My wife observed people at the Superdome staring at randomly posted
Post-It Notes, and noted that "Even at SLA we post the messages at the
notes board under letters of the alphabet."

Just yesterday I started sketching out an article on this very topic. 
There are three major problems here, at least:

-- There are too many competing people matching services, none co-ordinated

-- The Red Cross one is actually run by the International Committee of
the Red Cross.   They claim to have registered over 100,000 names by
now.  There are probably 1.5 million people displaced in the Katrina
Diaspora, so, if their numbers are accurate, they may have 8 or 9% of
the displaceed.  But the implementation could be much better; they
failed to even use a separate field for surname, and they sort the
list by first name (!!!)

-- These services assume that the displaced and the loved one each
have Internet access.

I've got to believe there's a better way.  For instance, could the
telephone industry solve this problem?  How about a form of Directory
Assistance that follows you from New Orleans or the Gulf Coast to your
current local number?  How about figuring out a way to forward New
Orleans residential phone numbers to your current phone number?

And if we're going to do Internet-based matching, are we using the
best technology?  Could Meet-Up apply?  E-bay?   The credit reporting
industry?  (Eg update your current address in your credit report --
though the last thing people from New Orleans need is to enable
creditors to find you.)

After 9/11 we saw desperate New Yorkers putting photos of the missing
up on walls.  The people matching problem is a hundred times worse
now.  There will be other disasters, and, at least in the federal and
federated United States, we probably won't solve the people matching
problem before the next one.

/rich

On 9/7/05, K.G. Schneider <kgs at bluehighways.com> wrote:
> One of the phenomena I've noticed in Katrina is the number of
> duplicated/overlapping resources, such as the plethora of people-finding
> databases--so many that a separate project has emerged to create a
> metasearch function for these databases (the People Finder Project). I also
> read a note on a completely unrelated list where a well-meaning guy seemed
> to be ready to build a temp-housing database, and he seemed unaware of the
> other databases that have already been developed.
> 
> One of the contributing factors, I've heard, is that the Red Cross was very
> slow in getting its people-finder function going. But I'm wondering if
> disaster preparedness doesn't mean ensuring databases are in place and
> widely accessible before a disaster strikes... or that there is a standard
> that allows for easy cross-searching of any disaster database, with ways to
> fine-tune searching through metadata.
> 
> Since we're librarians and presumably smart about this stuff, thought I'd
> let this thought emerge on web4lib...
> 
> Karen G. Schneider
> kgs at bluehighways.com
> 
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