Internet resources for the individual countries of Europe may be found on this site's Selected Internet Resources: Europe page.
Digital Gazetteers
GEOnet Names Server (http://earth-info.nga.mil/gns/html/)
A sophisticated database including over 5 million place names world-wide. Maintained by two U.S. agencies - the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, and the U.S. Board on Geographic Names. Probably the largest online gazetteer for most countries of the world. A pull-down menu allows searching by country, retrieving thousands or tens of thousands of records for most East European countries. Records give the name of each location or feature, variant spellings, latitude and longitude, and additional numeric data. Searches may focus on a variety of elements, such as populated place, administrative region, type of area, vegetation, and fresh- and saltwater features. Searches may also be limited to areas demarcated by two lines each of latitude and longitude.
Getty thesaurus of geographic names (http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/vocabularies/tgn/index.html)
Contains nearly 1 million place names representing approximately 900,000 places. Composed of names and other information contributed by several Getty projects, including the Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA), the Foundation for Documents of Architecture (FDA), the Getty Center Photo Study Collection (GCPS), and the Getty Information Institutes Vocabulary Program (VP). The TGN is the only available automated geographical resource that is hierarchical, global in scope, and targeted at researchers, catalogers, librarians, and archivists dealing with the history of art and architecture. The logical focus of a TGN record is the "place." Each place has attributes, including names, place types and coordinates. The places are arranged in hierarchies representing the current political and physical world.
Global Gazetteer (http://www.fallingrain.com/world/index.html)
Falling Rain Genomics, Inc. presents a collection of map coordinates for cities and towns around the world. The organization includes the coordinates for cities and towns in such countries as Afghanistan, Australia, the Bahamas, Canada, China, Egypt, Estonia, Germany, Iceland, Mexico, Nepal, Saint Lucia, Serbia, the United Kingdom, and Vietnam, among others.
JewishGen ShtetlSeeker
- Town Search (http://www.jewishgen.org/Communities/loctown.htm)
Part of the JewishGen website. The information comes largely from the book "Where Once We Walked," which focuses on shtetls in Eastern Europe. In English.
Maps
Perry
Castañeda Library Map Collection - Europe (http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/europe.html)
The University of Texas maintains this online collection of maps, including several for each country in Eastern Europe.
Agriculture
AGRICOLA (http://www.nal.usda.gov)
The U.S. National Agricultural Library makes available two important databases: 1) its online catalog, which reflects the library's holdings of books, periodicals and other materials; and 2) its subject-indexed database of periodical articles, reflecting the contents of agricultural journals world-wide from 1971 to the present. Thousands of article citations pertain to each of the East European countries or come from agricultural periodicals based there.
Natural Resources
FOSSIL. ENERGY.gov (http://www.fe.doe.gov/international/)
For many countries the U.S. Department of Energy provides a lengthy account of energy resources and policy.
USGS
Minerals Information - Europe and Central Asia (http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/country/europe.html)
The United States Geological Survey provides lengthy annual reports on the mineral resources of most countries throughout the world. The annual reports for many countries are archived beginning in the mid 1990s.
Environment
Central European Environmental
Data Request Facility (http://www.cedar.at/sitemap.htm)
Aimed at supporting international data exchange with the Central and Eastern European environmental community. Maintains an active email discussion group. A service of the International Society for Environmental Protection, located in Austria. In English.
EarthTrends (http://earthtrends.wri.org)
An environmental information portal for researching global topics, such as water resources, climate and atmosphere, population and health, energy resources, and agriculture and food. Allows users to gather information from the searchable database, display data tables, view country profiles, or select maps with global, regional, and country-level environmental information.
Environmental Issues (http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/)
Describes environmental and energy issues in most countries world-wide. Maintained by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Regional Environmental Center for Central and
Eastern Europe (http://www.rec.org)
A non-profit organization based in Budapest which encourages cooperation on environmental issues among governments, NGOs and businesses in Central and Eastern Europe. In English.
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