With over thirty thousand content objects in a variety of formats, the ISN holds a vast repository of data on international security research. But how do find what you’re looking for?
To enable you to locate articles, publications or podcasts for your specific area of interest, the ISN provides a filtering tool called “Find information”. The “Find information” box is located on the top right of the ISN website. First, select the most important criterion for your research, either subject or region. After clicking on your item of choice, you are presented with the topmost level of region or subject matter. To narrow down your research area, you can choose a more focused region in the tree view in the left pane. In the example below, we first chose “Africa” as a region and then narrowed the search to “Southern Africa”.
You could also narrow down the region even further. e.g. by choosing Angola or Comoros, but we will leave this for now and turn to the second filtering option, by subject. The subject tree is right above the region tree in the left pane. Clicking on a subject now will add this filter to the already selected region. For this example, we choose “Human Security” as the subject. We can also refine the subject search – you will notice that items which contain sub-items are marked with a + symbol before the name. We choose “Food” as the next step. From the initial starting point Africa, we have now narrowed the mass of information down to “Southern Africa”, “Human Security” and “Food”. As you can see, all chosen items are presented in blue, making your choices visible to you while traversing the subject and region keyword hierarchy. If you need to start over at any point during your research, you can click on “Remove Selection” next to the Subjects or Regions title and this part will be removed.
You can also choose the format in which you would like to have your content – the website shows publications as a default, but you can change this to news article, organization or podcast. Once you have arrived at this point, you can easily subscribe to an RSS feed for your filtered results. Clicking the orange RSS feed button on the right hand side will provide you with a link you can subscribe to in your favorite RSS reader. You will now be notified whenever new content in your selected area appears on the ISN website.