The Institute and the Internet

Being a research centre anxious to make the most of the latest advances in information technology and to keep a close eye on developments within its particular sphere of interest and research (the Balkans and South-Eastern Europe), the Institute for Balkan Studies has decided to go ahead and link up to the Internet.

What the Internet mostly offers to the Institute for Balkan Studies are:

• The e-mail, the most widely used application of the Internet. The electronic mail address of the Institute for Balkan Studies is imxa@hyper.gr.

  Each of the Institute's associates has his own e-mail too.

• The Institute also uses the FileTransfer Protocol (FTP) to transfer programmes and large files from distant computers and the Gopher and World Wide Web (WWW) tools to locate fields of special interest to it.

• Finally, the Institute can also join a newsgroup from the Usenet and receive and study all sorts of opinions about the topics that interest it. Eighty per cent of the people who take part in Internet discussions are students and faculty members of universities all over the world. The Usenet includes newsgroups that discuss topics connected with Greece, such as soc.culture.greek, for instance, or soc.culture.turkish, or soc.culture.classics.

Why the Internet is useful to the Institute for Balkan Studies:

• We can collect information about historical and political subjects relating to the Balkans.

• We can also collect and store data relating to Greek national affairs (the Macedonian Question, Northern Epirus, Greek-Turkish relations).

• We have access to libraries all over the world that are online (the Library of Congress, for instance, and other libraries in the United States, Great Britain, Australia, and elsewhere) and can thus locate titles and compile exhaustive bibliographies on Balkan topics.

• We also have access to international data banks and electronic data bases (e.g. DISCUS) that have material of interest to the Institute's researchers and their current research programmes.

In the immediate future, the Institute for Balkan Studies is planning to use the Internet for the following purposes:

• to give scientific institutions and libraries all over the world access to our specialised Balkan library;

• to enable the Institute to develop into an official processing agency for scientific data, which can then be transmitted to the Internet, possibly via some officially sponsored facility or Greek news agencies. The process of transmitting the texts is expected to be carried out via the Internet's home page for Greece.