The Library of Congress Country Studies Web site provides online access to the “country study” books prepared by the Library of Congress’s Federal Research Division as part of the Country Studies Area Handbook program. While the corresponding books retail at an approximate average of $25 per book (books in print), the country studies are available online free of charge. There are currently 91 country studies available.
Each country study depicts a foreign country in great detail. Individual country studies include representations and analyses of a country’s history, society, politics, environment, economy, government, and military. As the online equivalent of a print source, this Web site uses a table‐of‐contents format within each country study. On selecting a specific country, the user accesses a table of contents from which he/she selects specific chapters and parts of chapters. All country studies employ the same format, making this site very consistent and extremely easy to use, especially by frequent visitors.
Because users are selecting specific items from the table of contents, they can be very precise when browsing in this site. Since information is subdivided into so many distinct components, users needing large amounts of information may find themselves going back and forth quite a bit through the many links listed in the table of contents.
While having to click on all of these individual links may be a nuisance for some users, the great advantage, of course, is the detailed clarity in the table of contents of each country study. As noted earlier, each country study follows a similar format. One will find the following sections in each country study: • Preface [brief]
Country profile
Introduction
Ch. 1: Historical setting
Ch. 2: The society and its environment
Ch. 3: The economy
Ch. 4: Government and politics
Ch. 5: National security
Bibliography
Glossary
Each chapter then subdivides further into specific sub‐categories. Not surprisingly, as the country studies are essentially online reference handbooks, each of the sections making up the country studies are quite brief. Individual sections are followed by a “data as of” date to indicate currency of information.
Each country study “is written by a multidisciplinary team of social scientists”. Names of editors and “research completed” dates for each country study are listed on the virtual title page of each study. Latest additions to the Web page are marked by the notation: “New!” Individual country studies which have been completely entered (in terms of their having all text, photographs, maps, and charts available online) are listed in bold typeface.
The Library of Congress’s Federal Research Division publishes new editions of the print sources from time‐to‐time; and the online versions will be updated as well. Users may browse through an alphabetical list of countries featured in the Country Study series. From the main page, users may also search the contents of each study for specific terms.
For instance, a search for “Sikhism” points to sections from country studies of Pakistan, Thailand, Singapore, Nepal, Bangladesh,Sri Lanka, and Somalia. When searching the country studies, users can opt to limit their search to one or more countries. Users can also conduct searches within the specific country studies. The search engine supports Boolean operators.
Overall, this site is very well organized in a clear format that is easy to use. The informational content of this Web site is brief; yet the coverage is impressively extensive as many subject areas are covered. The links in this site load quickly ‐ even those with images. This Web site is highly recommended for public and academic libraries.
This is an incredibly useful reference resource which makes a great addition to library Web pages.
