Terrorism Resources
from the Fall, 2007, FDLC
This presentation was given by three experts in this field: Greta Marlatt, Director of the Naval Postgraduate School's Homeland Security Digital Library; Brad Rovison, Terrorism Information Center Director at the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism; and Brad Gernand, Library Director at the Institute for Defense Analyses. (I did not hear Mr. Gernand's presentation, as I left to hear attend another session –KA.)
The Homeland Security Digital Library is an aggregator, of sorts, collecting, cataloging, and making available information on homeland security and homeland defense (two distinguishable concepts, as Ms. Marlatt explained) from many different sources, mostly from within the government. Any depository library may have access to the website, by IP authentication. (This means that off-campus access by your students is not possible.) A "restricted area" of the website is only available to law enforcement personnel, but there is a wealth of good information, nicely organized, on the main site. One of their current projects that will benefit all of the documents community is a digitization effort involving older executive orders which are mentioned in more recent orders.
The Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism, founded in Oklahoma City after the bombing there, is a semi-independent agency that was previously under the Justice Department but has been moved to Homeland Security. The site is freely available, except for the "Lessons Learned" database, that is accessible only to law enforcement personnel. The other three databases that make up the site's content are the Responder Knowledge Base, the Terrorism Information Center (which does include some publicly available "Lessons Learned") and the major one: the Terrorism Knowledge Base, which includes detailed information on terrorist groups, terrorist incidents, and analytical tools which permit graphic and other ways of comparing and viewing database content. [KA]
