Sponsored and published by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), ReliefWeb was launched in October 1996. It acts as a clearinghouse for information delivery to humanitarian agencies around the world for the purpose of delivering emergency and disaster assistance worldwide. ReliefWeb focuses primarily on current disasters, updating its web site in a timely manner “as the events unfold”, but also distributes information about “forgotten disasters” on a regular basis. It also maintains a searchable archive of emergency responses to past disasters, dating back to 1981, for research purposes.
According to the website ReliefWeb has a database of more than 300,000 maps and documents, and posts as many as 150 maps and reports daily from the more than 2,000 UN agencies, governments, non‐governmental organizations (NGOs), academia, and news agencies around the world. Besides offering up to date information via the web site, ReliefWeb also maintains an e‐mail listserv with more than 70,000 subscribers, allowing those with low bandwidth Internet connections to receive information more reliably. ReliefWeb has grown considerably in the past few years in particular, claiming a rise from 1.5 million hits per week in 2002 to more than 3 million per day after the South Asia tsunami disaster of December of 2004. ReliefWeb has been included in many NGO and UN resolutions, focusing on disaster and emergency information sharing and retrieval.
ReliefWeb's homepage is well laid out and fairly easy to navigate. Tabs at the top lead to more information on the latest updates, countries and emergencies, appeals and funding, policy and issues, professional resources and maps. A search box is easily accessible and an advanced search button leads to a search function allowing the viewer to narrow keyword searches to document types, specific regions or countries, source types, emergency types and dates, among others. The homepage features prominent placing of ReliefWeb's map database, headline news features, links to OCHA's partners and other websites, as well as a location to sign up for daily or weekly e‐mail updates and RSS feeds. ReliefWeb posts information about their privacy policy as well as legal, donor support and extensive contact information for all of three of their international offices (New York, Japan and Geneva).
While the Help site contained vast amounts of information, there were few links and the text, while helpful, was a rather cumbersome to wade through. A few other interesting features include a My ReliefWeb where a user could potentially customize the website, and a tour of the new and updated features and how the site could be best used to locate needed information. There was virtually no change in site navigation between Internet Explorer and Firefox and graphic maps throughout made for easy viewing.
While the About pages boast current and up to date reliable information, it was interesting to note that the news release regarding the Iranian earthquakes, which happened the day this review was written, still had the original postings on the ReliefWeb homepage. Buried within the report however, was a link to an updated posting with more current information about disaster assessment from UNICEF, the WHO and other UN agencies. Perhaps the RSS feeds and e‐mail lists received this timely information with the web site updated only as schedules permit.
This site is free to all and no pages were found to be password protected. A few recommendations for improvement would be strengthening the Headlines updating process, inserting a few more graphics on pages heavy with text and improving the navigability of the Help pages. ReliefWeb would be an excellent site to include in bookmark pages at public libraries, high school media centres and universities.
