Resources

Worcester offers students a dynamic urban setting with a reasonable cost of living. The second largest city in New England, Worcester is conveniently located less than an hour from both Boston and Providence, with convenient bus and rail links to New York City and Washington D.C. Built by immigrants in the nineteenth century, Worcester continues to be a bustling destination for new arrivals from around the world as well as a site for urban revitalization. These conditions make Worcester a living laboratory for our research and teaching in spatial analysis, sustainable community development, and environmental policy and management.

Clark University is host to many world-renowned research centers:

The Robert H. Goddard Library has collections that include more than 555,000 volumes, 265,000 monographs and subscriptions to 2,000 periodical titles. The Library provides full Internet access and nearly 50 end-user subject specific databases.

As a member of the Worcester Consortium for Higher Education, Clark offers students the use of eight academic consortium libraries and a combined local collection of more than 3.5 million volumes.

The GISDE Resource Lab, supports the GIS master's program and geography graduate students using geoprocessing in their research. The lab contains: high performance microcomputers, large format digitizers, high-resolution color scanner, large format color printer, laser and color ink jet printers, GPS receivers and ethernet connections for internet access. Available software includes IDRISI, CartaLinx, ArcInfo NT, ArcView and many others pertinent to GIS, statistics, database management and graphics production. Also available to GISDE students are computer facilities in the IDCE, JK Wright and Cofert Labs.

The Guy Burnham Map Library is a federal depository for cartographic information. Its collection includes 220,000 map sheets, aerial photographs, CD-ROM databases, archived satellite imagery, GIS and image analysis texts, as well as atlases, journals and globes.

The Jeanne X. Kasperson Research Library has special collections on risk and hazards, global environmental change, sustainable development, water resources, energy, technology and a growing set of collections on selected countries.

Clark Labs for Cartographic Technology and Geographic Information Systems is a world leader in the creation of GIS and image processing software. Clark Labs provides affordable access to the frontiers of spatial analysis including Idrisi and CartaLinx.

The Women's Studies Library houses materials from a variety of sources that directly address contemporary women's issues. The library is operated and maintained by students and faculty from many departments within Clark University.

The George Perkins Marsh Institute (GPMI) is dedicated to research on one of the most fundamental questions confronting humankind: What is and ought to be our relationship with nature? Named after the noted environmentalist George Perkins Marsh and built on a tradition of basic and applied research on environmental hazards and international development, the Institute fosters team-based research that engages graduate students and research faculty in problem formulation and resolution. It is home to some 63 research faculty, staff, and graduate students, with appointments ranging from the humanities to the social and natural sciences.

The Human-Environment Regional Observatory-Central Massachusetts (HERO-CM) research program provides opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students to analyze the causes and consequences of global environmental changes at local scales in faculty-led research projects. This program leverages links with students, researchers, advocates, and policy makers in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Kansas, and Arizona.

The Computer Facility for Environmental Research and Teaching (CoFERT) is a facility created by gifts from the Culpeper and Keck Foundations. It supports research in Geography and the Marsh Institute requiring large data sets and advanced computer-based analyses. The lab has a Windows NT server capable of handling a large number of clients. Additional hardware includes Pentium NT workstations and other data input and output peripherals, such as a large format color printer, a flatbed scanner, slide scanner, CD-writers, and large format digitizers.

Other websites of interest:

Eldis Gateway to Development Information
id21 (communicates UK-sourced international development research to policymakers and practitioners worldwide)
United Nations Development Programme
Focus on the Global South
The Development Gap
The International Forum on Globalization
The New Internationalist
La Via Campesina (The International Peasant Movement)