Use "diplomatic" links as a jumping off point for locating many government Internet sites.
Diplomatic and information services homepages have a number of advantages when trying to locate foreign government information:
- The pages are designed to convey a country's political or business stance to the public. Therefore, the sites generally concentrate on up-to-date information designed for a general audience. You are likely to find more "policy briefs" than in-depth studies of issues.
- Many diplomatic missions attempt to keep either a comprehensive list of government Internet sites in their home country or to serve as the main jump off points from their home governments. Even if the only link is to a Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the home country, you will often pick up the trail to other government Internet sites from the ministry pages.
- Pages for links to U.S. based embassies, consulates, and information offices will be in English. Be aware that once you leave the U.S. link, the other government links most likely will be in the home country's native language.
Here are some good homepages with comprehensive lists of U.S. based diplomatic missions and information services.
Use an "area studies" page link.
These pages fall into two groups: those that are part of the WWW Virtual Library (a hierarchical "subject" arrangement of Internet sites) and those that are developed by academic and research institutions with serious interests in a region and regional issues. The advantages of this approach are:
- They generally pull together a wide variety of Internet sources, including major government links, related to their area research interests.
- Those pages developed by academic and research institutions may list their own research studies -- or better still, provide full text of some studies.
- The WWW Virtual Library pages are among the most comprehensive sets of links available and are regularly updated
- Most of these pages are in English
Here are a few of the area studies pages available on the Internet. These should lead you to others.
- The WWW Virtual Library. These are the main subject pages and their searchable Database of the WWW Virtual Library
- Africa
- African Studies WWW
- Africa South of the Sahara -- by Karen Fung, Stanford University, Hoover Library for the African Studies Association.
- Asia
- China WWW Virtual Library --from the Institute of Chinese Studies, Heidelberg University
- Asian Studies -- part of the WWW Virtual Library Catalog
- Asian Studies Virtual Library
- Asian Studies - Asian Continent Information Resources
- China WWW Virtual Library --from the Institute of Chinese Studies, Heidelberg University
- East Asian Libraries Cooperative WWW
- South Asian Studies
- Tibetan Studies -- part of the WWW Virtual Library Catalog
- Vietnam WWW Virtual Library
- Australia/Pacific
- Europe
- Indigenous Studies/Fourth World
- Aboriginal Studies -- part of the WWW Virtual Library Catalog
- Center for World Indigenous Studies
- Fourth World Documentation Project -- from the Center for World Indigenous Studies
- Latin America
- Latin American Studies (UT-LANIC) -- part of the WWW Virtual Library Catalog, includes a list of research institutions.
- Middle East
- Middle East Studies from Columbia University-- part of the WWW Virtual Library Catalog
- Middle East Studies from Univ. of Texas, Austin -- part of the WWW Virtual Library Catalog
- Islamic and Middle Eastern Law -- part of the WWW Virtual Library Catalog
Use a geographically arranged lists of sites.
These are often the most complete listing of Internet sites in a country, but generally do not differentiate between government and non-government sites in the country. Also site names are likely to be in the country's native language.
Here are some geographically based lists:
- Worldwide Governments on the WWW -- a comprehensive list of sites.
- Yahoo - country Links Section -- the oldest and still one of the best hierarchical arrangement of Internet information.
- Virtual Tourist: http://www.vtourist.com/
Use a Subject approach
You could also use one of the major WWW search engines to locate information on your topic. If you choose subject searching, keep in mind these principles:
- Do not assume that the pages will be in English. To thoroughly search you must use both English words and words in the country's native language. For example: to search for statistics from a spanish speaking country do the search once with "statistics" and then a second time with "estadisticas". Also consider alternative spellings of English words such as "organization" and "organisation".
- Be prepared to sift through a lot of non-governmental materials before you reach the government materials.
- Be an intelligent information consumer. You are likely to find a lot of questionable information as well as many useful sites. Be sure that sites you identify are "reputable" sources and that you understand what political bias might be promoted.
Here are a couple of good search engines for a subject approach:
- Altavista -- one of the best for international material since it has a translation feature. -- You will get very good results IF you take the time to read their help screens. If you don't your results will be very poor ( you will either get nothing at all or far too many hits). This site also can do translations from German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Italian on the fly.
- Excite -- another good search engine.
- Google -- a very user friendly site
- For an extensive listing of search engines try All Search Engines.com or use Fossick.com for a list of specialized search engines and directories.