Abstract
Columbia University Press, beset like most other academic publishing houses by the rising costs of printing and the tightening budgets of their main clients, had a splendid idea. They would create a virtual publishing house, to pioneer in the field of international affairs a commercial website. It would simultaneously give scholars and institutions the chance to do one-stop shopping and browsing among academic journals, books and conference proceedings, while also allowing them a cheaper and faster way to publish, and thus save that endangered scholarly species, the monograph. The easy to recall address for Columbia International Affairs Online is www.ciaonet.org. The first problem is that for a large majority of potential commercial customers who browse the web with software other than Netscape or Microsoft's Internet Explorer, IT web pages are difficult to access. As a commercial operation, with annual subscription fees ranging from $595 to $I,I95, depending on the size of the academic institution subscribing, access to CIAO's website is guarded by security codes. CIAO was essentially developed for MS Internet Explorer and Netscape, the two biggest web browsers.The system software specifications require Netscape Navigator 3.0 or higher, or Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.2 or higher,'for full functionality'. Any potential client trying to reach it by way of AOL or Compuserve, two of the biggest on-line services, but not yet fully compatible with the other web browsers, will encounter difficulties. The system that has been set up is new and problems of incompatibility will have to be resolved in order that everyone can benefit from the services on offer. The trick, at least for AOL subscribers (this does not seem to work for Compuserve) is to go into the Net, access Netscape, and go into CIAO that way. (This reviewer found the AltaVista search engine the most reliable.) En route, such a cyber-pilgrim is likely to find himself lost in Italian chat forums, where ciao is a popular prefix, or perusing the wilder shores of Web fantasies about the CIA. The service was launched last August at the annual convention of the American Political Science Association, with an initial total of 400 papers, amounting to
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