Informing Food Protection Education: A Project to Define and Classify Resources for a Cross-Disciplinary Expert Community.

Abstract

In the wake of the September 2001 attacks, the U.S. government founded the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with responsibility to develop a National Infrastructure Protection Plan for securing critical infrastructures and key resources. DHS established interdisciplinary networks of academic expertise administered through Centers of Excellence across the country, each addressing a different aspect of homeland defense. The National Center for Food Protection and Defense (NCFPD), created in 200: organized over 150 experts around five theme groups: Agent Behavior, Event Modeling, Systems Strategies, Risk Communication, and Educational Programs. The fifth theme group, Educational Programs, was the focus of a special library project to assist experts in delivering "high-quality education and training programs to develop a cadre of professionals equipped to deal with future threats to the food system." An initial database provided National Center for Food Protection and Defense experts with a listing of educational resources and their uniform resource locators (URLs). In 2009, NCFPD formed a team of librarians and subject experts to finalize the framework for a working collection of food protection educational resources. The framework consisted of 1) a scope of work for the database, 2) descriptive metadata elements and classification decisions, and 3) a vetting instrument to maintain the utility and currency of selected information. This paper describes the work performed by the database team to create criteria for inclusion and classification of resources consistent with NCFPD end-users' evolving needs. A content validity method is described that was used to gauge whether the team's conceptual definition of the domain of information was congruent with that of the expert community being served. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]