Tracking international sources

By Nora Paul and Neil Reisner

If you’re interested in seeing how international stories affect your local audience, try these sources that offer a view to countries around the world.

If you need background on a country and lists of links to relevant sites, check out these sources:
• www.orientation.com. A full service site for country specific information (but not for North America or Europe — only central and Eastern Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Oceania, Latin America and the Caribbean).
• One World/Nations Online at www.nationsonline.org. Finding the list of countries is a bit of a scroll, but once you do you get a list of links to tourist guides, airlines, railroads, news, museums, universities, and local country search sites/directories.
• Vive World at www.allnewspapers.com. Click on a country or find countries that have certain characteristics and get a brief backgrounder and list of links to government sites, local media, financial institutions, and museums.

To search Web sites within a country, try:
• www.searchenginecolossus.com. Select a country and get a list of country specific directories and spiders. Indicates language it is available in and where the site originated.
• www.twics.com/~takakuwa/search/.
• www.searchenginewatch.com/links/Regional_Search_Engines/

If you are looking for a listing of the government and legal resources for individual countries, consult these guides:
• www.gksoft.com/govt/en is a link to the key government agencies.
• www.gksoft.com/govt/en/parties.html links to political parties by country.
• The NYU Law Library’s guide to foreign and international legal databases can be found at www.law.nyu.edu/library/foreign_intl.

Also, the Washburn University School of Law Library’s foreign and international law is at www.washlaw.edu/forint/forintmain.html.

A guide to multicountry/multilateral agreements can be found at fletcher.tufts.edu/ multilaterals.html.

• For evaluating international legal sites, try www.llrx.com/features/evaluating.htm.

For translation services, consider:
• E-lingo at www.worldblaze.com/search/ index.html. Need to find pages from non- English sites but don’t know the search term to use (much less be able to read the results)? E-lingo can help. Put in a search term in English, select one of five languages to translate it to (German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese) and get the results back translated to English.
• Babel Fish at babelfish.altavista.com. Put in the address of a Web page you’ve found, select the “translate from … to” option and get the page back with a very rough translation.

Other helpful sites: Cops and crime: talkjustice.com/cybrary.asp and www.copnet.org/local/index.html.

Economics: www.odci.gov/cia/di/products/hies, www.oecd.org/dac/debt/htm/debto.htm, www.worldbank.org/data/.

Education: unescostat.unesco.org.

Health: www.who.int/whosis/

Labor: stats.bls.gov/flshome.htm, laborsta.ilo.org/cgi-bin/broker.exe

Tourism: www.world-tourism.org/

Trade: www.census.gov/ftp/pub/foreign-trade/www/

This tipsheet was prepared for the 2000 IRE National Conference in New York by Nora Paul, then library director at The Poynter Institute, and Neil Reisner, then an education writer at The Miami Herald. Paul is now director of the Institute for New Media Studies at the University of Minnesota. Reisner is now law editor at the Miami Daily Business Review.