Section 5: Tips for Discovering Information Resources
Relevant to Environmental Treaties and Resource Indicators
If you
have additional questions about environmental treaties and resource
indicators, you may wish to consider the following options:
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 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.
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!
