As an initiative of a scholar specialized in the field of elections and political parties in post-communist states, the Erik Herron’s Guide collects and organizes research on politics in East Central Europe and Eurasia. The website’s main goal is to provide and share previously inaccessible research material and to promote cross-national and cross-institutional dialogue. It gives access to a directory of thousands of links to governmental and non-governmental websites based in post-communist areas and to other pertinent resources. Following a completely free access policy, this portal includes over 3,700 links and a few dozens research papers on critical issues, including the process of democratization and the development of free elections and political parties in transition countries. Along with news on recent elections, records are also provided in other languages than English (mostly Euro-asiatic ones), also with possibility of selecting Cyrillic fonts. Links and web-references can be saved only on-screen, while research material is usually downloadable in pdf, rtf, or xls format. A keyword-based search engine is provided, under a basic design and an extremely simple classification structure. The general content appears to be updated quite irregularly.

This website enlists a variety of Political Science Graduate Programs in the United States and elsewhere in the world, divided in several regional areas and also including Distance/Online Programs. It is part of the GradSchools.com network, the leading online resource for information about graduate schools, with over 58,000 programs listed. Launched in November 1996, the main site contains a unique and comprehensive directory categorized by curriculum and subdivided by geography. These listings on GradSchools.com are updated each night, allowing program administrators to appropriately modify their descriptions. These databases are managed by Educational Directories Unlimited, Inc., a family of services dedicated to building a bridge between students and educators by offering comprehensive online directories of higher education programs. This PS-related database features specific pages with a short description, a direct link and email address of the chosen state or institutions, along with any relevant information. A simple design allows to easily locate and/search for the desired country or school, while a dedicated Info Center (covering the entire GradSchools.com network) has articles, blogs, and many more resources.

The Intute:SocialScience, provided by the Resource Discovery Network by merging two of its databases (SOSIG and Atlis), is both a catalogue and a search engine covering Internet resources in the field of the social sciences education & research, with some extensions in business and law, sport and tourism. The overall catalogue covers about 30,000 resources selected with scholarly knowledge and its database (Harvester) contains over 350,000 pages from selected social science websites worldwide. Each section is edited by a scholar or an expert and is frequently updated. Users can read the description of each available resource and access it directly. While Intute is a free and open gateway, the full material retrieval depends on each resource’s access policy. The website also includes several additional services: a well-updated blog, timelines of important events, a news aggregation tool, free support materials, info on career opportunities, academic meetings and workshops. This gateway also enables users to customize theirs service, to suggest new resources and to receive field-related updates. Its simple and effective design allows for a successful navigation. Also useful is the Virtual Training Suite, including a series of ad hoc tutorials and other tools to improve users’ skill in Web research. Other available tools include advanced search thesaurus and help pages.

Law and Policy Institutions Guide is a gateway for legal research dedicated to finding reputable and current legal and legislative resources on the web. Covering very broad academic, professional, legal, non-legal and governmental areas (law journals, law firms, legal blogs, government, etc.), users can find the selected resources, each with short but accurate descriptions. The gateway is mainly centered on the US legal system, but nevertheless this gateway is a useful tool for worldwide scholars interested in legal and juridical topics. Along with a new section on worldwide law resources, LPIG provides abstracts and detailed metainfo – but full access to law articles and downloading is allowed only through a small monthly fee subscription. The website pages can be translated in various languages through an automatic Google-based translator, although with the typical limits of such options. Search features are possible through a two-step system: a simple search feature by broad categories and then a more specific search mode by basic multiple keys and boolean operators. This gateway is interfaced with the legal search engine “Find Law” and provides also an interesting collection of interviews with several authors and legal experts (which can be received through a RSS news feed subscription). Generally well designed, easy to navigate and quite up to date.

LexisNexis is a highly professional gateway to an impressive amount of primary sources, mainly newspaper articles and public records about the legal, corporate, government and academic world. Thousands of worldwide newspapers, magazines, journals, financial data, public and legislative records are accessible via this website. With its 3,546 newspapers and over 36,000 sources, LexisNexis is an outstanding access service. Visitors can freely access the extremely complex lists of electronic archives, each briefly described with a basic set of metadata (ownership, location, publication year and range) — this is one of the most comprehensive repository and tool provider of legally-oriented electronic publications. A high-tech interactive sitemap, based on visual networks, is available to help users refine sophisticated search strategies across the growing LexisNexis databanks. Non-subscribers can retrieve only item lists or document abstracts level. Full services (documents access and downloading in pdf or image format) require a paid subscription, with some records available on a pay-per-view basis (with Visa and Mastercard). Also available is a free headline news service, covering daily U.S. and world news from authoritative sources, while its online bookstore provides a large selection of books and CD-ROM about a variety of topics.

The Librarians’ Index to the Internet (LII) is an extraordinary effort to monitor the expanding Internet universe, providing links to open access sites selected with rigorous and transparent criteria. It is a searchable, annotated subject directory of more than 20,000 Internet resources selected and evaluated by librarians. Free availability is the main guideline for including sites: fee-based websites or those selling products are not included “unless the site also offers important informational content for free”. LII Advisory Board is composed of librarians from a variety of backgrounds (academic, public, corporate). Every site in the LII database is reviewed several times according to open guidelines before being published. The gateway’s staff also uses a weeding program to keep the site updated; then the editors review and upgrade each item. New records are also included in the weekly e-mailing, a free-subscription service providing info on updates posted on the website. Users can also subscribe to a RSS feeds and to several news aggregator. Linked websites are annotated with descriptions of their content, format, last update, technical features, and the chance to send users’ comments. The site’s homepage is clearly divided in several sections (government, business, media, law, people, etc.), each of them with more subtopics, under an effective and user-friendly design.

Launched in 2001 as a partnership of the Centre national d’enseignement à distance and the sociological sections of the Ecole normale supérieure Lettres & sciences humaines de Lyon, LiensSocio has become the major French portal for social sciences. Its function is mostly as a gateway to French scholarly resources on the Internet, although it provides also current news, information on research publications and seminars and conferences organized all around France. as well as calls for papers and job opportunities. The site content is fully and freely retrievable by accessing the different portal sections, where over 1,500 webresources – very useful for PS researchers and students – have been divided under 14 main categories (multimedia, forum, institutions, research, etc.), each one with its own sub-category system, and a dozen of specific sections (opinions, ideas, lectures, etc.). Source entries have been selected, classified, and evaluated with a simple popularity-based rating system, although they are also rated for their content richness. The homepage is quite dynamic and rich in visual and textual elements – the risk of information overload is avoided by a careful design based on four columns. Also provided are several search options, with effective results, along with a free email newsletter subscription and a RSS feednews.

Launched in January 1995, the Political Studies Association gateway has grown to a collection of over 12,000 links pointing to a variety of political information sources on the Internet. The PSA gateway displays links to governments, legislatures, political parties, non-governmental organisations and mass media as well as to on-line national constitutions, academic political journals and libraries, data archives of interest to political researchers. However, the content outline and resource descritption is not always clear. Classifications of categories and links are on a thematic basis. Resources and links are briefly annotated or simply listed. Users can browse the category listings by country/region or by topics and they can also suggest a resource to be included in the database. Based on a simple and intuitive design, this web site is open to the public in its entirety and is quite user-friendly. Also provided is a comprehensive sitemap and a powerful keyword-based search engine (also to be used for the entire PSA Web site).

Politische Bildung Online portal was created in 2000 by both the German Federal and the Regional Agencies for Civic Education with the aim of enhancing and promoting civic and political knowledge and information to the German public. Its pages and contents – available in German only – offer a wide range of materials and sources about many political and social topics. The structure of this portal consists in different sections each providing a different kind of records. For example, online versions of federal and regional Politische Bildung agencies publications are fully available in pdf or html format, while newspaper articles and reports about current hot topics are offered with a direct link to the original source along with annotations and descriptions. Also some elearning materials are available, linked to specific online projects and mainly related to EU-topics, all described and available for all interested. A web-catalogue shows about 2,000 websites and sources classified by topics and carefully described with plenty of metainfo. Records are downloadable in many different formats, included many audio/video files. Access is completely open and free for all users. Printed versions of desired records can be ordered for free or purchased online. The overall outline is sophisticated but well designed and in compliance with W3C standards.

Launched in 1999 as an offspring of the Département des sciences de l?homme et de la société, under the scientific management of CNRS, Revues.org is the oldest collection of France’s online journals (over 50). Directly and independently developed by the scientific community as an entry point to social sciences references, Revues.org aims at improving accessibility to these journals by gathering them in a single and consistent environment, and also by widening the partnership with several French institutions (École nationale des chartes, Maison méditerranéenne des sciences de l?homme, Centre de communication scientifique, several universities, etc.). This website features a specialized search engine for the social sciences (called In-extenso), which covers resources selected and collected by another affiliated (and directly linked) website, l’Album des Sciences Sociales. While each of them has its own characteristics, taken together these tools provide a powerful instrument to browse and search the research field in French. The section called “In-extenso” provides also a second search space covering journal titles and abstracts of about 200,000 articles, while over 1,000,000 webpages are regularly indexed. The entire reference material, as well as any other content, is freely and fully accessible.