Internet Reviews

Joni R. Roberts and Carol Drost

Joni R. Roberts is associate university librarian for public services and collection development at Willamette University, email: jroberts@willamette.edu, and Carol A. Drost is associate university librarian for technical services at Willamette University, email: cdrost@willamette.edu.

Climate Change Laws of the World. Access: https://climate-laws.org/.

The Climate Change Laws of the World database enables users to search more than 5,000 climate laws and policies. This resource is a partnership between the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment (at the London School of Economics and Political Science) and Climate Policy Radar (a not-for-profit climate startup). The data cover 196 countries, territories, and the European Union. The homepage has a single search box as well as an interactive world map, enabling users to search the full text of any document or explore by country.

Data are added on a rolling basis from official sources including “government websites, parliamentary records, and court documents.” Contributions are also accepted through form submission with guidance provided under the “Methodology” section of the website.

An important thing to note is that the documents included in the database are in multiple languages. A strength of this resource is that the full text of the documents is searchable in English, with translations provided by Google Cloud Translate. For non-English documents short passages that contain the user’s search term are translated into English and presented alongside the full document in its original language. However, the full text of the document is not currently available to view in English. As of July 2024, full document English translations appears on Climate Policy Radar’s public product roadmap in the “Designing” phase, meaning starting within six months. The roadmap demonstrates active development and rapid, ongoing improvements since 2022.

This resource is most relevant to scholarship in public policy and political science. Currently it may be best suited for faculty and graduate students because navigating documents in multiple languages may require more advanced research skills. Undergraduate students using this resource may benefit from additional guidance to get documents written in English so that they can read full documents, such as filtering by country or using the country profile feature.—Lucy Rosenbloom, Xavier University of Louisiana, lrosenbl@xula.edu

Institute for the Study of War. Access: https://understandingwar.org/.

The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) intends to help all citizens, journalists, and policymakers understand what is happening in conflict zones around the world. Created in 2007 by the founder and president of ISW, Dr. Kimberly Kagan, the site is an established news source publishing up-to-date reports and assessments of current conflicts including Ukraine, Iran, and China.

ISW research analysts gather open-source information and synthesizes their findings. These sources include government and non-government news sources, which are corroborated with other sources such as video, first-hand accounts from social media, or satellite images about what is actually happening live on the ground. ISW research analysts have a deep understanding of the region they are reporting on. After gathering all the information they can, analysts make observations, predictions, and assessments of conflicts in their area of expertise.

It is important to note that Kagan and many of ISW’s board members have a record of interventionist policy recommendations. Although the ISW states that they “[produce] strictly non-partisan, non-ideological, fact-based research,” it is difficult to be completely unbiased when making assessments of global conflicts. Further, their list of corporate supporters includes institutions like General Dynamics and General Motors that profit from the defense industry. Noting these two indications of potential bias, the information presented on ISW’s site is factual and it is often cited by media sources reporting on current events in current conflict areas. Overall, ISW provides valuable reports on current global conflicts. The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft offers a counter-viewpoint of United States foreign policy from that of the ISW.

The ISW site is organized for browsing so the search function is a bit clunky. Nonetheless, ISW is appropriate for all levels of undergraduate and graduate students interested in foreign policy, peace and conflict studies, political science, and military affairs.—Kristen Peters, Wittenberg University, petersk@wittenberg.edu

Integrated Digitized Biocollections. Access: https://www.idigbio.org.

Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio) is the result of a collaboration between the Network Integrated Biological Alliance (NIBA) community and the NSF Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections (ADBC) program. It is a ten-year plan to digitize the approximately one billion biological specimens held in museums, universities, and institutions across the United States and make them searchable and available to everyone via the iDigBio portal. The goal is to make all the US biological collections available to students from kindergarten through graduate school, as well as researchers and hobbyists. The hope is that they will learn and make discoveries about plants, insects, and animals as well as biodiversity, populations, and their past and present geographical ranges.

The NIBA is providing the infrastructure and recommending technology, software and standards, best practices, and training to make this happen. Links to this information are available on the homepage under “Digitization,” and “Sharing Collections.” “Working Groups,” “Proposals,” and “Citizen Scientists” all promote ways people can become involved or participate in the process. The website also provides links to resources for “Researchers,” “Collection Staff,” and “Teachers & Students.” To address sustainability, NIBA has invested in DataNets, ensuring long-term digital preservation with federal agencies and commercial vendors.

There is a link to the portal from the homepage and it is searchable by common name and scientific name. However, knowing the scientific name is advantageous when using this resource. Specific coordinates can be searched or circles/rectangles and can be drawn on the map to limit to specific geographic locations. Any of the available search fields can be used to filter the results. The defaults for sorting are by genus, specific epithet, and date collected. If users are looking for a specific species and know the scientific name, they may want to remove the genus to get to the desired results more quickly rather than browsing through every possible variation.

The top five taxa are listed on the map, which also helps narrow things down. Records can be selected from the list or data points on the map and give the current location of the specimen, taxonomy, specimen, collection event, locality, and access to media (recording, image) of the specimen, if available. Those interested in data and images of the natural world will find this site useful.—Meredith Ayers, Northern Illinois University, mayers@niu.edu