Our Story buttons/fp.buttons

Friends and Partners: Goldmine of US-NIS Information on the Internet

Friends and Partners (F&P) is an excellent example of the potential the Internet holds for finding, organizing, or exchanging information across a broad spectrum of subjects. Established in January 1994 by Natasha Bulashova in Pushchino, Russia, and Greg Cole in Knoxville, Tennessee, F&P has quickly blossomed into a large and varied information service for people active in US-NIS projects. A "mirror server" was recently established in Pushchino which will enable users in the NIS to have much faster access to the information without the relatively high network traffic costs that they used to have to pay for "foreign" information.

Friends and Partners is a World Wide Web (WWW) site and uses text, graphics, audio, and, someday soon, video. Like all World Wide Web sites it uses "hypertext links," which, when activated, connect the user to different files on computers all across the Internet.

F&P has also started its own mailing list, to which nearly 700 people already subscribe. Postings to the mailing list are collected and distributed to subscribers every two or three days in the form of a digest. Recent digests have included announcements of conferences to be held in the NIS this summer; suggestions for Cyrillic fonts and readers; news of projects by people travelling to the region; and questions about how to find contacts. The digests also regularly describe new files added to Friends and Partners.

The list of topics under which F&P has collected files is listed below. This list comes from the Friends and Partners' "Home Page," which is the first file users see when they visit the site. Each menu item is a hypertext link to other resources:

There isn't space enough in this newsletter to describe every file at such a rich site as Friends and Partners, but some of the more interesting branches off of the home page include:

Funding and Exchange Opportunities

Resources under this section include a listing of foundations supporting work in the NIS, a fact sheet on USIA (U.S. Information Agency) programs in the region, information about the Eurasia Foundation, IREX and the International Science Foundation, and a listing of more than 100 grant programs, primarily though not exclusively for scholars.

Science

Includes articles, in English and Russian, from Russian scientific journals, and resources on agriculture and environmental sciences.

More Information Resources

This section includes links to eight World Wide Web servers in Russia including the "Welcome to Russia Home Page" recently established by Relcom, the major e-mail provider in Russia. There are also links to dozens of FTP and Gopher sites rich with Russian, NIS, and East European study materials. Of particular interest to students of the region is a searchable database of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Daily Reports that Greg Cole has assembled.

Of interest to people in the NIS working in the health field will be the "Health and Medicine" section. This section was created by doing a search on the Internet which resulted in a list of servers (Internet sites) which have health-related files. The list includes hypertext links to servers with a wealth of files in such fields as anesthesiology, oncology, biochemistry, public health, and medical research libraries. The Education section includes a similar listing.

The beauty of these lists is that users in the NIS don't have to spend costly on-line time searching for resources and trying to figure out how to log on to many different computers. Instead, they can just go to Friends and Partners, which has already done the search and provides a gateway to the Internet site appropriate to their needs

Getting There

If you have access to Mosaic, Lynx, or another WWW browser you can go directly to Friends and Partners from within your specific browser by typing the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) for F&P:
http://solar.rtd.utk.edu/friends/home.html

Otherwise you can telnet to the site. At the % (UNIX) prompt type:

% telnet solar.rtd.utk.edu

At the login prompt type:

login: friends
To subscribe to the Friends and Partners mailing list you can either select the appropriate hypertext link from the home page (just after the list of category topics) or send an e-mail message to:
listproc@solar.rtd.utk.edu
In the message part of your e-mail form type:
SUBSCRIBE FRIENDS firstname lastname
From Russia, users without direct IP access (but with telnet access) can telnet to:
april.ibpm.serpukhov.su
At the login prompt, type: friends. The URL for the mirror server in Puschchino is: http://april.ibpm.serpukhov.su/friends/home.html

The creators and directors of Friends and Partners are:

Greg Cole, Research Services
The University of Tennessee
211 Hoskins Library
Knoxville, TN 37996

Tel: (615) 974-2908
Fax: (615) 974-6508
E-mail: gcole@solar.rtd.utk.edu

and

Natasha Bulashova, Pushchino, Moscow region, E-mail: natasha@ibpm.serpukhov.su

Navigating in Friends and Partners

If you telnet to Friends and Partners you will find yourself using Lynx, a common World Wide Web browser. The commands are very simple:

Space Bar		View next page
b			View previous page
Up or Down Arrows	Move between hypertext
Right Arrow		Select highlighted hypertext link
Return (same)		Select highlighted hypertext link 
Left Arrow		Go back a link
You can e-mail to yourself any document that you open, by pressing P for Print, then selecting "Mail the file to yourself." At the prompt, type your full Internet address and press Return.

This article is from the May 1994 issue of

Civil Society ... East and West: Net Talk An annual subscription for eleven issues is $25. "Civil Society ... East and West" is available for free via e-mail to people in the NIS. For more information or to order a subscription, contact:

Center for Civil Society International
2929 NE Blakeley Street
Seattle, WA 98105

Tel: (206) 523-4755
Fax: (206) 523-1974
E-mail: ccsi@u.washington.edu
trailers/mainfp.trailer 01-February-1996