State of Baja California Human Rights Commission Archives Case Digitization Project Phase 2B and/or 3

Tabbed

Description & Rationale

These cases hold information on the types of abuses that were filed during that time along the Baja California/California border. The data in these cases, many of which were terminated, closed, or dismissed before full investigations were completed, will provide a snapshot of the region for border scholars and historians alike. The goal of this project is to eventually make all of these older cases available for research and data mining online via DigitaIUSD, USD’s Institutional Repository. This proposal asks for funding for Phase 2B to redact the digitized cases and Phase 3 to apply metadata for eventual ingesting into the repository.

Reasons for consideration:

Border scholars on the border region of Mexico and the United States are interested in data on human rights violations. Border scholars in the San Diego region have expressed interest in the possibility of data mining Human Rights cases–except these haven’t been digitized. Only the recommendations (cases that make it to the National Human Rights Commission) are digitized, and only the most recent recommendations have been anonymized. The CEDH human rights lawyers have also expressed interest in seeing past cases digitized. Currently, they only have access to the details of these cases in a minimal format: case number and case resolution. Digitization and anonymization of the data would allow researchers and citizens alike to learn the details of these cases.

For Phase 2B, we will anonymize and redact all of the digitized cases. We will make a PDF copy for each file. This copy is the one that will be redacted using Adobe Acrobat Pro DC because it can remove data, not just mask it. This will help remove all sensitive data permanently before uploading it to the institutional repository. The CEDH and USD are committed to protecting the identity of all the people involved in these cases. A librarian, one full-time assistant, or two part-time assistants will carry out the workload. Due to the nature of this sensitive work, the timeline will be longer in order to allow for multiple double-checking and ensure victims’ names and addresses are not missed. For this phase, 12 to 14 months will be needed to create the 16,061 cases’ PDFAs.

In Phase 3, immediately after being redacted, cases will have metadata descriptions applied following the Dublin Core metadata standard. A librarian, one full-time assistant, or two part-time assistants will again carry out this work. Approximately 12 to 14 months will be needed for the cases to have metadata descriptors added, as this will be done immediately after each chase has been anonymized. The length of time was calculated based on the number of cases 16,061 equaling 431,106 pages or 128 Gigabytes.

Author(s):

California Human Rights Commission Archives

Source Format:

Paper

Target Format:

Digital

Program:

LARRP

Resource Types:

Dataset

Government documents

Other

Regions:

Latin America and Caribbean

Countries of Origin:

Mexico

Status	Current	Description
Flagged	no	The proposal is flagged for further research.
Vetted	no	The proposal has been examined and vetted.
Ballotted	no	The proposal is currently on a committee ballot.
Approved	yes	The proposal has been selected for reformatting. Reformatting efforts are pending.
Reformatted	no	The proposal has been reformatted and access information is now posted.
Inactive / Declined	no	No longer under consideration for reformatting.