Section 5: Tips for Discovering Information Resources Relevant to Environmental Treaties and Resource Indicators

• Ask the ENTRI team, by sending an e-mail to entri@ciesin.org. This is a particularly good option if your question has to do with the ENTRI system and contents; treaty status information; natural resource indicators; or remotely sensed data.
• An excellent way to answer particular questions is to post a concise, specific query to a relevant internet mailing list. You may be pleasantly surprised at how swiftly the global consciousness responds to your inquiry.
  • A keyword search tool is maintained at D'Angelo Law Library, the University of Chicago.
  • Many users have had especially good experiences using the INT-LAW mailing list, to which you may subscribe by sending a message to listserv@ciesin.org, message body "SUBSCRIBE INT-LAW [Your E-mail Address]".
  • The INFOTERRA mailing list is a good place to look for information about natural resource indicators. You can subscribe by sending mail to majordomo@cedar.univie.ac.at, message body "subscribe INFOTERRA".
• Many universities and almost all law schools offer courses in international law. A standard English-language textbook is International Law: Cases and Materials (Third Edition), edited by Louis Henkin, Richard Crawford Pugh, Oscar Schachter, and Hans Smit.
• Williamette University College of Law Library provides Foreign and International Law links, a good general reference about international law.
• The Law Library of Congress operates the Global Legal Information Network (GLIN), which includes a searchable database as well as a very comprehensive Guide to legal information resources organized by nation and a Guide to multinational and international sources of law.
• The United Nations Treaty Database is an important and authoritative source of information about treaty texts and status. It has up-to-date information about treaty signatory status and, as far as we are aware, is the only on-line source for information about which nations have entered reservations to particular treaties. The UN service differs from ENTRI in that it does not have the treaty status information stored in a relational database for convenient look-up and comparison, and also in that the treaty status data in the UN Treaty Database is not integrated with other types of national environmental indicators.
• Cornell Law School's Legal Information Institute provides on-line access to decisions of the International Court of Justice.
• If you are seeking to make connections between treaties and socioeconomic and environmental data, the CIESIN Gateway is a distributed catalog that lists data and metadata related to human interactions in the environment, global environmental change, and sustainable development.
• The NASA Global Change Master Directory (GCMD) is a comprehensive source of information about Earth science, environmental, biosphere, climate, and global change data holdings available to the scientific community throughout the world.
• A Web search on the term of interest (e.g. "Ramsar") using a general search engine such as Lycos or Infoseek.
• A "URL-sifting" Web search using a tool such as Digital's AltaVista. For example, if you are looking for NASA data related to the Montreal Protocol, you can use the Advanced Search page of AltaVista to construct searches of the form "Montreal Protocol and host:nasa.gov", which would return every page in the NASA Webspace that contains the phrase "Montreal Protocol". A search of the form "Montreal Protocol and host nasa.gov and (image:*.gif or image:*.jpg)" would return every page in the NASA Webspace that mentions the Montreal Protocol and links to a .gif or .jpg image file.
• And never forget--it's always a good idea to ask the nearest reference librarian!