Reconnaissance provides full‐text information on geo‐political and economic events in Eastern and Western Europe and the former Soviet Union; economic forecasts and background historical data on 53 countries, including 391 maps, 1,064 graphs, and 2,013 charts and tables; and articles on the development of the monetary and political union in Europe and how this will affect the world economy. It is available on CD‐ROM or via the Internet. We reviewed the latter format where Reconnaissance appears as one of the databases on the City Mutual Web site. Others are: travel and tourism; sport, leisure, and amenity management; health and social care; and the world’s media.
The main page is divided into five sections: Western Europe, Eastern Europe, former Soviet Union; European Union (EU) development and institutions; economic and monetary union; EU policy areas; and European industries. The section on Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union covers general data, key issues, structure of government, the political system, economy, agriculture, education, health care and social welfare, transport infrastructure, energy and environment policies for each country.
The section on European Union development and institutions covers almost every facet of the European Union. It provides a history of the development of the EU and related treaties (e.g. Maastricht, Economic and Monetary Union, etc.). It covers European institutions like the European Commission, the Council of Ministers, the European Parliament, the Court of Auditors, the European Court of Justice, the Economic and Social Committee, the Council of Europe, the European Investment Bank, the EU budget, and the Committee of the Regions. Other sections cover the European Single Market and international relations, with particular emphasis on US trade and investment.
The European Economic and Monetary Union section focuses on the development of the European Monetary System (EMU) and the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), the benefits and implications of a single currency (as perceived in the early 1990s), the Maastricht Treaty and EMU, the ERM crises of 1992 and 1993, the state and future prospects of EMU in 1995 and 1996, and the last steps to EMU (1997 and 1998).
The final section on European industries gives an overview of a wide variety of industries in Western Europe along with relevant policies such as those for agriculture, competition, energy, environment, fisheries, etc. It also includes an audiovisual policy and cultural policy, as well as an economic and monetary policy among others.
One can easily search the entire database for a single word or a phrase or restrict a search to a section of the database. The database supports the Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT, with the default set to OR. It also supports the adjacency operators ADJ, W/, NEAR, and SAME which can be used to specify occurrences within the same paragraph or within a range of paragraphs. Since the search engine recognizes the space between words to constitute separate words, one must enclose a phrase in single quotes or substitute a comma, hyphen, or other punctuation mark for the intervening space. One can truncate words with the + or use the ∼ as a fuzzy search operator to retrieve variant spellings.
An advanced search box offers six buttons below the text box to execute or refine a search. Three active search buttons allow searching for free text, a specific record number, or to execute a Boolean search. The buttons to refine the search include: relate, dictionary, and fuzzy. The relate button shows a list of words related to the word(s) in the text box for selecting the most appropriate ones to add to the criteria. The dictionary button displays a list of words alphabetically adjacent to the word(s) in the text box for adding to the search criteria. The fuzzy button displays a list of words spelled similarly to the word(s) in the text box.
Users can control the number of hits displayed per page and the size of the information display. The search engine will always show the database title, the hit title, and the path of the hit; but researchers can determine how much further information will display. By checking the remote search check box, subscribers can be notified by e‐mail when new information becomes available that matches their search criteria.
Researchers can navigate the database by following its tree hierarchy or by following the hyperlinks within documents. There are 13 buttons at the bottom of the screen that appear when relevant to assist in navigation. The help screens (accessible by clicking on the parachute icon) adequately describe their use and operation. Pausing the cursor over the button opens a text box that also identifies it and indicates the action it will perform.
The interface seems rather spartan with no graphics; but response time is quick. The search results list shows the article title in bold along with an indication of where it fits in the organizational structure (path) and up to seven lines of the first paragraph. A weighted score appears to the left and an indication of the record size on the right. At the end of each entry appears an option to “Find more like this” which seems to execute a Boolean OR search for major subject headings or keywords in the article. This can be puzzling. One search which retrieved a single item expanded to retrieve over 100 more items when we selected the “Find more like this” option. Many of these items were related to the search topic but were not as focused as the original item.
There is a lot of information available in this product which is aimed at universities, consultancies, and corporations worldwide. It is not a news database, however; so one should not expect coverage of daily events and politics. As of early May 1999, we could not locate any articles dated 1999. One should not expect to find information about the conflict in Kosovo or the situation of the refugees, for example; but one would be more apt to find an analysis of the socio‐economic and political roots of the problems.
This product goes beyond the basic information found in titles like the CIA World Factbook. It provides more background information and analysis. While useful to political scientists, the database is particularly appropriate for companies doing business in Eastern and Western Europe and those who want to monitor socio‐economic and political trends in those countries.
