Current Issues: Environment is one of a set of products by H.W. Wilson designed to provide high school and vocational students with access to articles and other information on “hot topics”. The opening interface is attractive, providing access to the main topics through both images and a side panel of text links. Hovering over the images provides a brief scope note written by the section editor to key aspects of the topic. These editors are not named, and there is no About section of the site where such information might be available. There is also, incidentally no Help section specific to the Current Issues site.
Each of the main topics, ranging from Air Pollution to Water supply ‐ Africa, has a page listing the subtopics and some general web resources. Scope notes are not available for the subtopics. Some of these pages have comments, in an effort to encourage interactivity, but it is not clear who is providing comments, what the comments are for and whether or how they are edited before appearing on the page. Each subtopic links to a list of Editors selection articles, with the option to search the web, to obtain more full text articles or more citations. The links look like a typical Wilson results page with options for html, and in some cases PDF versions of the articles. The html versions provide the option for translation, and for hearing the articles in either male or female computer‐generated voices. As with other Wilson products the html text is both right and left‐justified, decreasing its readability. The web search option links to a Google search of the subtopic title.
This could have been a really useful resource for students researching environmental topics. Unfortunately the quality of the information provided does not live up to expectations, or indeed, to what the site says of itself. The site indicates that “An editor has researched this topic in WilsonWeb and chosen these articles, from among the roughly 2,400 journals to which Wilson has full‐text rights, as the most relevant and accessible articles … The roughly 5‐10 articles selected for each subtopic must represent an unbiased view of the issue covered in that subtopic”. In the subtopics checked by the reviewer this was clearly not the case. There did not appear to be much deliberation in choosing the articles, nor was there evidence of careful attention to bias.
Some examples may illustrate this. The subtopic Development of Water Resources in Africa lists the article Pace in Angola's Deep Water Slows, from Petroleum Economist. The journal title alone should have given away the fact that the article is about petroleum drilling in deep water and has nothing to do with water resources. The page for The Impact of Climate Change and Pollution on Arctic Wildlife lists seven articles, none of which focus on the environmental aspects of the topic. Instead, while there is a useful and neutral overview of regulations, and an article on technology which could be used to mitigate damage, the others discuss alternative fuels, arctic sea routes, native issues, Canadian parks where drilling is not taking place, and politics. Interesting to be sure, but perhaps not ultimately very useful for a student researching the topic.
There are also some odd overlap in the content of topics and subtopics. Two topics, Fisheries and Depletion of the Oceans, and Fishing and the Environment both include subtopics on Aquaculture, on Conservation. The search facility on the site alleviates this problem somewhat; searching for caribou found subtopics under The Arctic in Transition – Oil Drilling and the Arctic Refuge, and under Oil – The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR): To Drill or Not to Drill. But students would be unlikely to find both unless they too, used the search option. Cross‐referencing, or even better, careful editing of the site as a whole would be useful.
Given the theme of the database, and Wilson's long history of providing access to science information, the relative lack of articles from science magazines or journals, as opposed to those from business or news publications is disappointing. While Current Issues: Environment might seem like an ideal resource to provide information on critical topics to high school students, in its current state in cannot replace other sources. Especially in an age where understanding the science behind the issues facing humanity is so important to global citizenship, students need to have access to reliable information to enable them to understand their world. It is probably more useful to teach students to search databases and the Web well and to evaluate the information they find, than to use this database that provides pre‐packaged information of such varying quality.
