LINUS October 1998
Area studies and social sciences Web sites
Central Library RIS Dept Head
The proliferation of Web sites covering many different subjects can be bewildering. We bring you a select list of Web sites pertaining to Area Studies and Social Sciences from those reviewed and evaluated by the journal Choice, with annotations excerpted from Choice (Special Supplement to vol.35, August 1998 Z1039 Col.CC).. You will find the links on the Choice website; http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/home.html.
Area Studies
American Studies Web
URL: http://www.georgetown.edu/crossroads/asw/
The presentation of materials is highly eclectic, with the availability of Web sites undoubtedly determining the selection of particular online references. Historical and archival resources are chronologically arranged, but there is a dearth of references for the Colonial, revolutionary, and early nationhood periods. The coverage of the post-WWW II era is fairly extensive, while the 1960s are examined more fully still. For the researcher, the Archival Resource's subsection is particularly useful, provoding information on how to obtain Internet access to government depositories, including the National Archives and the Library of Congress.
Central Europe Online
URL: http://www.centraleurope.com/
CEO, which began in August 1995, covers primarily the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Five days a week, more than 30 reporters, editors, and designers compile an issue from their own investigations, wire services, and local press and update it about twice a day. Business and politics dominate, since business people, educators, and travelers are the targeted audience. The additional features of CEO (e.g. its travel and culture sections) make it a very useful source of information for anyone wanting to keep up with events in Central Europe. One unfortunate drawback of CEO is the unavailability of issues published more than two to three weeks before.
EuroDocs: primary historical documents from Western Europe
URL: http://library.byu.edu/~rdh/eurodocs/
EuroDocs seeks to list primary sources for European history in a straight-forward manner and continues adding resources. The effort is generally successful, impeded only by the uneven supply of appropriate texts and a few small problems. Among the positive features that deserve mention are a link to a guide to citation usage for electronic documents and a very simple arrangement. The editor, Richard Hacken (Brigham Young Univ.) wisely warns that a link does not guarantee that everything reached through that link will be the best possible material.
University of Texas Middle East Network Information Center (MENIC)
URL: http://menic.utexas.edu/mes.html
This is the single best Web site for Middle Eastern studies. One of the resources on its home page is a set of links to more than two dozen other Middle East centres and institutes. The MENIC home page is a simple and extremely clear index of eight categories including ancient history and archaeology, arts and culture, business and economics, government and country profiles, maps and regional travel information, news media and newsgroups. Because this Web site offers information about some of the most politically volatile countries in the world, it is inevitable that one occasionally encounters difficulties when trying to reach remote links in the region.
Asian Studies WWW Virtual Library
URL: http://coombs.anu.edu.au/WWWVL-AsianStudies.html
An authoritative, large-scale, subject-oriented scholarly guide to Internet resources in Asian studies. It functions as a research and access tool for Asian societies, politics, economies, histories, and cultures. ASVL currently has 76 subdivisions organized by topic, country, and region, offering more than 10,000 Internet resources worldwide. These include archives, library catalogs, documents, bibliographies, electronic journal registers, and mailing lists. ASVL provides an impressive array of Asia-Pacific global resources, eight regional resources, and data for 62 individual countries and territories. All links are inspected and evaluated for their quality and usefulness for Asia studies research. However, because of its multinational collaborative nature, the quality and information about individual countries and territories vary at each site.
Southeast Asia Web: Southeast Asian studies
URL: http://www.gunung.com/seasiaweb/welcome.html
This is the work of Stephen Arod Shirreffs who concedes that he will not be able to update the site frequently until he finishes his dissertation. Still, he has collected a number of potentially useful links to the California academic library Web sites and sites of the most important Southeast Asian newspapers and magazines, particularly those with a business orientation. He also provides links to such standard sites as those of the Association of Asian Studies, H-Net Asia, and Matthew Ciolek's extensive archive at Australia National University.
Social Sciences
Research Resources for the Social Sciences
URL: http://www.socsciresearch.com/
RRSS provides extensive links to Web sites of interest primarily to students and professionals in the social sciences. It is organized into 18 categories, including general resources, data archives, and news resources, and there are also links to sites for the various social science disciplines such as sociology, psychology, political science and economics. Each category provides links to Web sites, including e-journals, listservs, and full-text resources. Overall, RRSS is comprehensive in providing links to Web sites useful to the academic
community that are up-to-date, reliable, and of high quality.
Survey Research Center
URL: http://www.princeton.edu/~abelson/
This site aims to be a desktop information system for individuals involved in survey research. It succeeds in its objective to contain "everything useful on the Web for the practice of survey graphics". An excellent place to begin survey research, this site has enough depth to be attractive to all students interested in poll and survey findingsfrom novice undergraduates to experience researchers.
Political Science Resources on the Web
URL: http://www.lib.umich.edu/libhome/Documents.center
/polisci.html
Grace York (political science librarian, Univ. of Michigan) has organized an extremely comprehensive Web site on political science as a subset of her Documents Center for government publications. Under general reference tools, the Biography People Finder with 15,000 short entries is a very useful online tool. Government Resources is an excellent collection of links to federal, state, and international information. It is clear why PSRW is a multiple award winner. It has good organization and linking for navigation, the buttons have nice graphics, and the page as a whole is eye-pleasing. This very comprehensive site covers a wide breadth of politically related areas.
Richard Kimber's Political Science Resources
URL: http//www.psr.keele.ac.uk/
A trove of valuable, easily accessible hotlinks to information sites and research resources in political science, this site, maintained by Richard Kimber (Univ. of Keele), emphasizes UK politics. It is a valuable and incredibly rich Web resource for political scientists, including these who do not specialize in Great Britain.The Web site is easy to use, well organized and updated regularly.
Electronic Policy Network
URL: http://epn.org/
This is an amalgam of nearly 50 think tanks, policy institutes, and research institutions, primarily US-based, with a liberal or progressive posture. The user can zero in on a specific group, search by one of six policy categories or keyword search all sites simultaneously with a Hot Bot search engine. The pages of links are very well done and are built around the same six categories used throughout the Web site. There are fairly comprehensive listings of public policy programs and political science departments at colleges and universities.
PsycSite
URL: http://stange.somplenet.com/psycsite/
PsycSite, functions as a launch site, providing links to other sites on the Web of interest to psychologists, psychology students, and others interested in the science of psychology. The list of online information sources for psychology is fairly extensive and well organized. A list of psychology journals currently available on the Web is also available here. Unique features of PsycSite include a list of resource individuals who have volunteered to answer questions related to their area of psychology, and a chat room (requiring a JAVA-enabled browser).
SocioWeb.
URL: http://www.sonic.net/~markbl/socioweb/
SocioWeb currently provides a helpful and varied Web site for sociology. It is divided into 12 categories: Net Indexes & Guides, Commercial Sites, Giants of Sociology, Journals & Zines, Sociological Theory, Sociological Associations, Sociology in Action, Surveys and Statistics, Topical Research, University Departments, and Writings. Most sections provide a selection of hotlinks to other Web sites, often including sites in Canada and Europe. Although it will certainly need to expand its coverage in order to provide access to a more extensive array of sociological information, this site currently offers an interesting group of links and would be a helpful place to begin looking for information about sociology.
Library News
CD-ROM Highlights
Collection Highlights National University of Singapore Library
A Sense of History
Datastream in HSSML
FAQ on reservations and renewals in LINC
New head for Cataloguing
New head for Digital Services
New head for Science Library
Online document delivery
Police Long Service and Good Conduct Medal for Zainal
CD-ROM on Windows & Dow Jones
Electronic Law Reports CD-ROM
Iolis on NUSNET
New at Central Library
New at Science Library
Area studies & social sciences Web sites
Beyond dust jackets
Films of Akira Kurosawa
Notable acquisitions for Chinese studies
Notable acquisitions for historical research
Recent materials on Effective Teaching Methods