USABILITY
The attractive opening screen has a title bar with links to Folder Log In and Saved Items at right. Beneath the title bar is a toolbar with Home, Gazetteer, Resources, and Help links, with a Search Box at right. Below that, another toolbar features dropdowns for Select a Country and Select a U.S. State, as well as links to Advanced Search and Search History. The majority of the screen contains a Featured Country section (with a link to the Country Profile); the Compare and Rank section; an In the News section linking to current articles; a tabbed section with Top 10 Lists (Biggest Cities, Largest Deserts, Highest Mountains, etc.); Regional and Thematic Maps; and a Cultures and Peoples tab that lets you research and compare Cuisine, Folklore and Mythology, Culture and Lifestyle, Holidays and Celebrations, Entertainment and Recreation, Languages, Religions, Etiquette, Sports, and Family Life around the world.

There are also two more exploratory sections titled Geography Concepts and Principles and Focus on the Earth, where you can “Learn about key ideas important to the study of geography” and “[e]xplore the Earth through illustrations,” respectively. They’ve packed a lot of stuff onscreen, but it doesn’t give you a sense of information overload, and it does offer lots of different ways to access the information, including some ways that would not necessarily occur to most student researchers.

The first thing I did was go into the In the News section, where I found four articles with geographic terms in the headlines covering the climbing death toll in Pakistan, wildfires in Russia, a fatal Gaza blast, and the Gulf oil well disaster. As I wrote this review in early August, those seem like newsworthy global reports—not as timely as the New York Times but not bad for a non-news resource.

Next, I looked at the Resources button, where I discovered links into Maps and Flags, Images, Compare Countries, Rank Countries, Compare U.S. States, Rank U.S. States, Geography Concepts and Principles, Geography Glossary, and a Conversion Calculator. Nice and logical.

Then I checked out the Gazetteer, which lets you explore various places around the world according to five categories: Landforms, Physical and Administrative Regions, Populated Places, Public Works and Landmarks, and Water Features. I clicked on the Fort or Military Installation under Public Works and Landmarks and was taken to a Browse screen that let me view results by country or state, where I selected New York under View by State. I got back four listings: Fort Edward, Fort Stanwix, Fort Washington, and Fort William Henry. But where was Fort Ticonderoga? (I was planning a trip and was on the lookout for it.)

A simple search for Fort Ticonderoga netted nine hits, including a specific Gazetteer entry for the fort, four other gazetteer entries for adjacent places, two biography entries (Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold), and two state entries (historical overviews of New York and Vermont). All of this made good sense; I’m just wondering why it didn’t come up under Fort or Military Installation.

To test the country comparison tools, I decided to use Natural Gas Production as a factor to compare the outputs of Albania, Angola, Iran, Oman, and the United States (this was very easy to do, using a series of selection menus). I got a lovely graphed result, which I could then Print or Export into Excel. The full citation information for the graph accompanied it (in MLA style; clicking a radio button will switch it into Chicago Manual of Style), as did the Record URL.

I clicked through many other parts: Top Ten Lists (interesting and informative), Cultures and Peoples (short entries but on-target), and maps (which could readily be made larger or smaller, with PDFs available for download). I also browsed through the 30 images making up the Focus on the Earth section (ranging from Air Masses to the World’s Oceans). They’ve made it easy to reuse this material—you can print, email, and download it quickly. The Images section is eminently browsable, and the Geography Concepts and Principles section is highly informative.

PRICING
Prices start at $650 for K-12 libraries and $1400 for public and academic libraries, based on either full-time enrollment or number of cardholders.

BOTTOM LINE
The best aspect of this resource is its design; both novice and expert researchers will be able to make good use of the tools it provides. The file will be enormously helpful to students seeking topics for research, and the imaginative presentation of data here might just entice the science-wary into the field of geography at an early age. It’s geared toward K-12 and community college audiences, and for those researchers it merits a ten. A well-conceived and well-designed geographical reference, World Geography and Culture Online is strongly recommended for public, community college, and school libraries. For free trials go to http://www.fofweb.com/trial/.