Part of ABC-CLIO’s Contemporary World Issues series, this work offers a broad overview of water-related problems faced throughout the world today. It deals with a selection of contemporary challenges and solutions to the complex set of problems characterised as a global water crisis.
The work introduces basic topics in encyclopedic entries of a couple of pages with each one containing a significant amount of cited references as well as further reading. A Perspectives section includes individually authored essays and case studies that attempt to reveal the complex nature of water issues. A Profiles section includes essays about notable individuals and significant organisations. A brief Data and Documents section contains a small number of tables and a collection of primary documents, largely legal resources, court case summaries and laws (including, for example, the Colorado River Compact). A very useful feature of the work for undergraduate students is an Annotated Bibliography where a paragraph is used to indicate the content of each work in the bibliography. However, the annotated bibliography is limited to books and articles published in the most recent years, that is, few years before the publication of this work. A selection of works from a broader period may have been more beneficial to students attempting to gain basic knowledge of this field. The work ends with a chronology of important events in water management covering over 8,000 years of human history. The work also contains a glossary, as has been a common practice in textbooks and some encyclopedic works for many years, but upon reflection, the definitions used here are not so specialised as to be irretrievable via simple use of an internet search. Given this, and the near ubiquity of smartphones among college students, this reviewer wonders if such features are a particularly practical and useful feature in reference works today.
The version of this work reviewed was the ABC-CLIO-hosted e-book. ABC-CLIO’s e-book platform uses Tizra Digital Publishing Platform. This e-book publishing platform has been commented on frequently in these columns including by this reviewer in covering Trash Talk: An Encyclopedia of Garbage and Recycling around the World (Collin 2015) (RR 2016/165). In this particular work the presentation of the pages, while eminently readable, is presented in columns where only the left-hand column is used on each page. This does not obstruct the use of the materials, but is a disconcerting departure from the traditional book format that it would appear the publishers are attempting to recreate in this e-book. Searching within the e-book platform to find books and sections is a menu-driven pop up interface that is easy to use and, notably, the results screens include a keyword in context results display. In addition to this search functionality, the work being reviewed contains a detailed table of contents. Unfortunately, sometimes the page-to-page navigation arrows are obscured by images within the work’s pages. Also, it must be noted that the e-book did not contain durable links to the articles online. The index is also oddly displayed within the ABC-CLIO e-book platform, containing two columns that are condensed to the left-hand side of the screen, leaving the right-hand side of the page/screen blank. The resulting display of index entries is confusing, which mars an otherwise reasonable index.
The work is available in print, or online via several vendor platforms including Ebrary, EBL and Ebscohost and under a variety of license and prices and the Gale Virtual Reference Library under tiered institutional pricing.
The author is an astoundingly prolific writer of textbooks covering a wide variety of topics, predominantly in the science and engineering fields that have some relevance to broader society. The author’s academic background is in chemistry and education, including receiving an EdD in Science Education from Harvard University.
This work would be a reasonable addition to any library serving institutions with undergraduate programmes in a broad range of different disciplines including public policy, environmental studies, political science or engineering. Conversely, it must be noted that reference works in this subject area are many and frequently published and this work may represent a duplicative resource for many libraries.
