GO FOR THE GREEN

Greener Buildings has news and resources on architecture and design, building materials, energy use, facility management, interiors, waste management, and water use to promote more environmentally responsible construction. Each topic contains the following five elements: background articles, links to relevant organizations, tools and resources such as audits or handbooks, case studies, and recent news stories.It is a product of Greener World Media Inc., which also produces GreenBiz, ClimateBiz, and other sites. They offer a free e-mail newsletter as well. It is sponsored by various construction-related companies.

URLs:
Greener Buildings: http://www.greenerbuildings.com
GreenBiz: http://www.greenbiz.com/
ClimateBiz: http://www.climatebiz.com/

FOUR INTERESTING NEW WEBSITES

UNDERSTANDING PARLIAMENT?!
The UK Parliament now has a website with a glossary—“Parliamentary jargon explained.” Absolutely fascinating.
URL: http://www.parliament.uk/about/glossary.cfm

MAPS OF THE WORLD
This site has maps of almost anything you could want: cruises, honeymoon destinations, time zones, cities, USA state symbols, earthquakes, etc.
URL: http://www.mapsofworld.com/

COUNTRY PROFILES, FROM A CANADIAN VIEWPOINT
Citizenship and Immigration Canada has published cultural profiles of over 100 countries that have sent immigrants to Canada. It “provides an overview of life and customs in the profiled country…and the customs described may not apply in equal measures to all newcomers form the profiled country.” These are fine, but I prefer the CultureGrams, published by ProQuest. Originally written by Brigham Young University, they are “concise, reliable, and up-to-date reports on more than 200 countries, each U.S. state, and all 13 Canadian provinces and territories.”
URLs:
Canadian Cultural Profiles: http://www.cp-pc.ca/
CultureGrams: http://www.culturegrams.com/

GREEN SEARCH ENGINE
Greener is designed to “find green products, services, organizations, information” in over 9 million pages. There is no sign of who put the site up, so I’m a bit leery of it.
URL: http://greener.com/

WHAT WOULD THE WORLD LOOK LIKE IF EVERYONE LIVED LIKE ME?

This is the question asked by Consumer Consequences, from American Public Media. Take the quiz to determine your (or your family’s) impact on the environment. It is interesting, informative, and—at least for me—a bit frightening.

URL: http://sustainability.publicradio.org/consumerconsequences/

EARTH SCIENCE INFORMATION FROM NASA

The Global Change Master Directory is produced by the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration/Goddard Space Flight Center. It has data on agriculture, atmosphere, biosphere, biology, climate, cryosphere, human dimensions, land, oceans, paleoclimate, the earth, spectra and imagery, sun-earth interactions, and ground water/water quality. You can search by subject, name, date, or location. There are also links to tools for data analysis, models, and metadata handling. If NASA has collected it, you can probably find it here.

URL: http://gcmd.gsfc.nasa.gov/

GREEN RESOURCES—A GOOD EXAMPLE TO FOLLOW

The King County Library System (Seattle, Washington, USA) has a great page on their website with lists of “green” resources—on responsible environmentalism—in their collection. Not only is it a good source for collection development, but it is an example that you could follow if your customers are interested in this subject (which they should be). It is divided into books, picture books for children, books for students, periodicals, DVD or videos or kits, and websites.

URL: http://www.kcls.org/research/infogreen/

GREAT LAKES WIKI

If you are looking for information about the (US) Great Lakes, a good place to start is this wiki, started by students of environmental journalism, telecommunications, information studies, and media at Michigan State University (Lansing). It “explores new ways of speeding the flow of information, knowledge and news about one of the world’s greatest natural resources. [The five lakes contain over eighteen percent of the world’s fresh surface water.] It relies on the experience and knowledge of a network of citizens, including scientists, hunters, policymakers, environmentalists, anglers, lakeside property owners, boaters, business operators, and others.” Articles are grouped under Culture, Recreation, Geography, Commerce, Ecology, and Areas of Concern.

URL: http://greatlakeswiki.org