Nation-wide Portal for Sociologists

Jukka Partanen 16.3.2001

Web Resource Project of Sociology

The web resource project of Sociology was launched in the Autumn of the year 2000 with the support of the Ministry of Education. The aim of the project was to establish a Finnish nation-wide portal or website for social sciences, particularly sociology which would gather together researchers, students, digital publications, materials and unpublished research material.

As the project has advanced, the plan has crystallised so that in order to avoid overlapping work with departments of sociology, virtual libraries and others, the Web Resource for Sociology has concentrated on gleaning of information with the needs of researchers and students in mind. For Finnish social scientific research this means in practice searching and collecting relevant current articles, publications and projects on the pages of the web resource and informing about them to the interested parties. In the web resource, we have also tried to describe briefly the contents of the pages.

The project's pages (in Finnish) are at present in a testing phase. What remains yet to be done is making the pages uniform with other web resources and defining the scope of the resource. The web resource ought to be complete by the beginning of summer.

Gleaned information for researchers and students

As the amount of digital material increases, winnowing out useless information becomes more and more important. On the other hand, along with net publications, the availability of many out-of-print classics has been considerably improved.

An easy accessibility of original or primary sources serves both researchers and students. In this net resource for sociology this service is provided by a collection of pages dedicated to original sources.

To facilitate the work of students, there is a tailored web-site where encyclopaedias, a theses registry, grants and scholarships, connections to abroad etc. are listed. A virtual address of its own has been established for social psychology.

Also the idea of an up-to-date website is being considered. A future problem in it might be that a site like this would call for a much more frequent updating than other sections of the web resource. Sharing this obligation with other instances - like the social scientific net journal possibly to be established - is well worth a serious thought.

A project within the Network Services Master Program of the University of Tampere is preparing a specialist registry of it's own for the web resource. The registry will be completed during the Spring 2001. The web resource project for Sociology works in co-operation with the virtual library of the University of Tampere.

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