web site review

"A compilation of gambling-related resources available online," and the Alberta Gaming Research Institute, http://www.abgaminginstitute.ualberta.ca/ (last accessed May 30, 2007)

Reviewed by Dean R. Gerstein, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA, U.S.A.e-mail: dean.gerstein@cgu.edu

The Alberta Gaming Research Institute (AGRI) is a joint enterprise of the Universities of Lethbridge, Calgary, and Alberta; is fueled by core support from the Ministry of Alberta Gaming; and is intended primarily "to support and promote research into gaming and gambling in the Province," but also aims to achieve international recognition for its research results and as a convener.

The AGRI Web site is primarily a catalog of study activities and research communications sponsored by or underway at AGRI. The site is designed for academically oriented researchers, bearing little of immediate value to help-seekers or clinicians looking to pinpoint services or techniques. The coverage includes AGRI's flagship annual Banff conference, an accumulating portfolio of competitively awarded research projects featuring such well-known psychological investigators as AGRI principals David Hodgins and Robert Williams, and abstracts of all gambling-related news stories in the major dailies in Edmonton, Calgary, Lethbridge, and Toronto.

Of special interest to researchers within and outside Canada are the richly hyperlinked library resources developed and maintained by AGRI librarian and information specialist Rhys Stevens. These include roughly 20 comprehensive research bibliographies on economic, sociocultural, biopsychological, and policy topics; descriptions of and connections to a global array of gambling conference proceedings, gambling journals, and other on-line catalogs and bibliographic collections in Canada; links to many other gambling research newsletters and institutes worldwide (the listing is heavily Anglophone, but that is perhaps a reasonable representation of things as they are); and a fine list of core source references on such matters as pathological gambling prevalence, other statistics, and official policy reviews.

Among the more universal products of the library's activities is a series of periodic e-mailed updates of new gambling studies, reports, events, and miscellanea under the title, "A compilation of gambling-related resources available online."1 These emailed bulletins emerge roughly bimonthly and include listings (with hyperlinks to all of the cognate URLs) under the following headings:

• Online Research & Reports, which features new entries in the worldwide (albeit rich in North American) "gray literature" of final reports to and from official governmental or other agencies concerned with gambling, noted here as they enter the AGRI Gambling Literature Database, comprising "publications from government, academics, business and industry which are not controlled by commercial publishers";

• Conferences, Events & Funding, a prospective listing of upcoming gatherings on various continents plus (under Funding) active calls for research proposals;

• News/Newsletters/Journals, which includes press releases, significant news stories (not restricted to Alberta/Canada), calls for papers to special issues, and often a mini table of contents for new numbers of research staples such as the Journal of Gambling Studies, Gaming Law Review, and (of course) JGI; and

• Miscellaneous Items of Interest such as new books, trade publications, conference proceedings, survey databases, Web site launches, and TV shows.

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This review was not peer-reviewed. Submitted May 31, 2007. All URLs were available at the time of submission.

For correspondence: Dean R. Gerstein, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA, U.S.A. E-mail: dean.gerstein@cgu.edu

Competing interests: None declared.