The US Central Intelligence Agency last week released the 2001 version of its annual reference book the CIA World Factbook (last year's factbook is discussed in the September 1, 2000 Scout Report). The data, which are current as of January 1, 2001 in most cases, cover 266 countries as well as the "world," a category that summarizes the data overall. For each country, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe,...

The US Central Intelligence Agency has recently released the 1999 version of its well-known annual country information reference book (last described in the February 5, 1999 Scout Report). Data is available for more than 260 countries. For each country, map and flag, geographic, population, government, economic, communication, transportation, military, and transnational issue information is...

The US Central Intelligence Agency has recently released the 2000 version of its well-known annual country information reference book (last described in the September 24, 1999 Scout Report). Data are available for more than 260 countries. For each country, map and flag, geographic, population, government, economic, communication, transportation, military, and transnational issue information is...

This new briefing service from eldis (Electronic Development and Environment Information System) (originally reviewed in the October 9, 1997 Scout Report for Business & Economics) offers access to a large amount of informative material on individual countries. The heart of this material will be multiple documents providing sectoral profiles of Agriculture, Environment, Economics, Gender, Politics,...

The Getty Information Institute offers this massive browsable and searchable "structured vocabulary" of almost one million place names and 900,000 places around the world. Information in the thesaurus is derived from such Getty projects as "the Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA), the Foundation for Documents of Architecture (FDA), the Getty Center Photo Study Collection (GCPS), and the Getty...

For those interested in map information, National Geographic's Map Machine is an effective place to start. Map Machine's Atlas allows users to click on a world map or on continent or country menus to retrieve country maps, with concise information and flags. There are also selected area maps available, created from weather satellite data, as well as political and physical maps and a Macromedia...

Users can search this database of British rock units by rock unit, preferred map code, maximum age of rock unit, and database status code (described at site) and retrieve information about which British Geological Survey (BGS) maps and publications cover those units. For example, a search for Stockdale Group and Ashgil leads to a record citing the lithology, upper and lower boundary definitions,...