2.1. Are there any sources of information on Mongolia in the Internet?
Description
This article is from the Mongolia FAQ, by Oliver Corff with numerous contributions by others.
2.1. Are there any sources of information on Mongolia in the Internet?
Yes and No.
First the No. Until about 1994, There used to be only a number of
miscellaneous documents (mainly U.S. government publications) on
Mongolia available on the Internet. These documents (not much more
than a handful of files) were partially outdated, difficult to find
and frequently available on various mirrored sites increasing the
confusion.
Now the first Yes. In spring 1994, the USENET newsgroup
soc.culture.mongolian came into existence. It enjoys a certain
popularity, not only among Mongolia specialists but also among other
interested persons. This newsgroup (which is not moderated) offers
lively discussions on all sorts of topics ranging from food to
religion, from history to modern politics. Many frequent contributors
supply soc.culture.mongolian also with news about current events,
exhibitions etc.
In order to read the news of soc.culture.mongolian, start any of the
news readers available on your machine (this may be tin, rn, nn, or
any other favourite). Following the instructions, it should not be too
difficult to subscribe to soc.culture.mongolian since this is a
mainstream USENET newsgroup which should be available at any Internet
site featuring USENET services.
Now the second Yes. The Mongolia Society in Bloomington, Indiana
established a WWW home page in Summer 1995. The WWW homepage gives
information about the Mongolia Society and its activities. The
Mongolia Society URL is: http://www.indiana.edu/~mongsoc. The author
of this site, Mitch Rice, is very active in collecting, bundling and
updating Mongolia-related Internet documents, references to other WWW
home pages on Mongolia and Tuva, gopher servers and single documents
on Mongolia in the Mongolia WWW Virtual Library, the URL being:
http://www.indiana.edu/~mongsoc/vl.html
Now the third Yes. The Mongolian Internet provider Magicnet, the URL
being: http://www.magic.mn provides news about Mongolia and even as a
daily download of ``Today'' articles. ``Today'', or Önöödör in
Mongolian, is the most important newspaper in Mongolia. For reading
the articles, a special font is provided which can be loaded into
Microsoft Windows environments.
Now the fourth Yes. Recently, many more Web sites on Mongolia have
emerged, some of them with a focus on travel, others with a focus on
Southern (Inner) Mongolia, again others focussing on Chinggis Khan and
his spiritual heritage. Instead of including all references here I
wish to redirect all requests to the Mongolia WWW Virtual Library.
Now the fifth Yes. In November 1993, the first gopher server offering
dedicated information on Mongolia started working. It was located at
Free University, Berlin, Germany, and could be reached via (do not try
that anymore, that is history now!): gopher gopher.fu-berlin.de .
This gopher server used to offer the Infosystem Mongolei featuring a
small but growing collection of articles, maps, legal documents and
software related to Mongolia. From early 1995 on, this gopher server
was supposed to migrate to a WWW site, but, alas! due to a handful of
reasons this aim could not be achieved before spring 1996.
In its present phase, the Infosystem Mongolei - WWW site is to a
certain yet small extent still a mirror of the former gopher site but
soon the former gopher site will only be recognizable as its root, not
as its substance any more.
New technologies are constantly advancing and create new opportunities
for publishing documents which seemed to be ``unpublishable'' due to
technical constraints. The new WWW site supports Chinese characters in
its documents eliminating effectively the need for dedicated software
on the users' side.
The Infosystem Mongolei - WWW URL is: http://userpage.fu-
berlin.de/~corff/ You can receive announcements about new articles,
updates etc. if you send a mail to infomong@zedat.fu-berlin.de with
the request to be included in the mailing list.
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