Author: leskneebone

Information Architect at Analysis & Policy Observatory

APO: The place to find places

APO’s website offers a number of ways to search and browse content. We have recently improved the way that you can find policy information that is relevant to a specific region or place.

APO publishes a geographical taxonomy of place names that can be used to browse and ‘drill down’ to content that is clustered around a region, country, province or city. 

Image: Middle East by NASA on Wikimedia Commons

To make the most of APO’s geographical taxonomy feature, try browsing for resources about a place of interest:

  • Navigate to Browse from the home page
  • Scroll to the Geographic Location block of links
  • Select a term (e.g. ‘Middle East’).

You will notice on the right-hand side of your results that more specific place names appear and can be selected to further refine results.

geo1

Select a more specific geographical feature, and the overall number of items reduces with content closely fitted with the geographical area:

geo2

When a resource is selected, there may be more geographical features listed in the resource metadata which link to more content:

geo3

APO’s geographical taxonomy is a search feature that helps you find a range of policy information about a given place of interest. As more resources are added to APO, the geographical taxonomy is updated to reflect the growing database of policy information. We hope you find this feature useful. 

APO identifier for library catalogues

APO is working towards standardising its metadata putting an APO ‘stamp’ – a unique identifier on each record that credits APO with doing the cataloguing.

APO is working towards standardising its metadata. No, this doesn’t mean we are tapping phones or retaining anyone’s browsing history (search for ‘data retention’ in APO for this policy topic if it is of interest. And then clear your history). By metadata we mean the way that we catalogue the reports, articles and so on in our database. And part of standardisation includes putting an APO ‘stamp’– a unique identifier on each record that credits APO with doing the cataloguing. This is important when APO records are shared beyond the website, for example with other databases or library systems.

To ensure APO is uniquely identified in other database contexts, we have been allocated a unique code by the Library of Congress, Network Development & MARC Standards Office. You can now find APO in the MARC Code List for Organizations. APO needs to be in this list so that when our metadata is shared in library systems, the catalogue indicates that the record was created by us.

And what is the code? AU-HaAPO (normalized: auhaapo). But only a metadata nerd would ask this. 🤓