* Resource for security topics
Ten years ago, I was an adjunct professor in the Institute for Government Informatics Professionals in Ottawa, Canada under the aegis of the University of Ottawa. I taught a one-semester course introducing information security to government personnel, and I enjoyed the experience immensely. Many of the chapters of my 1996 textbook, _The NCSA Guide to Enterprise Security_, were field-tested by my students.
In 1995, I was asked if I could run a seminar for graduates of my courses to bring them up to date on developments across the entire field of information security. Our course had 20 students and I so enjoyed it that I continued to develop the material and teach the course with the NCSA (National Computer Security Association; later called ICSA and then eventually renamed TruSecure, its current name) all over the U.S., Canada, Europe, Asia and the Caribbean.
After a few years of working on this project, it became obvious that saving abstracts in a WordPerfect file was not going to cut it as an orderly method for organizing the increasing mass of information I was encountering in my research. I developed a simple database in 1997 and have continued to refine it ever since. The database allows me to store information in an orderly way and – most important – to _find_ the information quickly. For that purpose, I put in as many keywords as I can think of quickly; I also classify each topic using a taxonomy that has grown in complexity and coverage over the years. These numerical codes help users locate articles quickly using filters (queries).
This year, I was privileged to begin working with Norwich students Karthik Raman (project leader), Krenar Komoni and Irfan Sehic as my research assistants. These excellent students have provided invaluable assistance in transferring data from NewsScan, NIPC/DHS reports and other sources into the database and have also done the first cut of classification and keyword generation. They have enormously improved the coverage of the field and are continuing their work with me to expand the database to further sources in the coming year. It is difficult to estimate the hundreds of hours of time they have saved me.
The IYIR reports are posted on my Web site now; see the introductory page at:
https://www2.norwich.edu/mkabay/index.htm
Click on the IYIR button for a list of PDF files you can read on screen, search, or print out at will. So far I’m up to 2003.
In addition, I have posted the complete abstracts as a Microsoft Access database file (.MDB) as well as a compressed version (.ZIP) on the Web site for use by anyone for non-commercial purposes. On the Web page, I will post the date I update the files.
I hope that these resources will be helpful to the IA community as we variously prepare articles and lectures for readers and students. Have fun.
