Aim
Profile
Resources / services
Partners
Aim
We provide the central point of access in Germany to rigorously selected bibliographic references, facts, documents and web sites relevant to the special subject collection International Relations and Area Studies (IBLK). We aim to provide our users with easy-to-use, clearly structured access to scholarly, up to date information.
Confronted with the huge amount of information of varying merit and relevance for scholarly research available nowadays, we guarantee a high level of quality by
- careful choice of our partners at a national and international level, typically the specialist libraries and documentation centres of research institutes working in the same field
- expert selection and indexing of relevant literature and links
- cooperation on information technology and procedures with German and European subject specialists
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Profile
IREON - The International Relations and Area Studies Gateway is a product of leading German and international research institutes working
in the fields of foreign and security policy and development policy. Their libraries and documentation centres form the Information Network International Relations and Area Studies (FIV-IBLK) consortium.
FIV-IBLK provides specialist information for research, education and policy-making, thus fulfilling the role of a national
information resource as outlined in the 1974 Information Programme of the German Federal Government, now under the auspices
of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).
Since 1974, FIV-IBLK has been producing the database World Affairs Online, one of the largest social science literature databases
in Europe. The database focuses on global and regional developments, foreign and security policy and social trends.
The FIV-IBLK coordinating body is the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP), Berlin.
Members are:
- Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP), Berlin
- German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA), Hamburg (ehemals Deutsches Übersee-Institut)
- Freie Universität Berlin (FU), Otto-Suhr-Institut für Politikwissenschaft
- Deutsch-Französisches Institut (dfi), Ludwigsburg
- Deutsche Gesellschaft für Auswärtige Politik (DGAP), Berlin
- Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (ifa), Stuttgart
- Südost-Institut (SOI), Regensburg
- Hessische Stiftung Friedens- und Konfliktforschung (HSFK), Frankfurt
- Bonn International Center for Conversion (BICC)
- Institut für Friedensforschung und Sicherheitspolitik (IFSH), Hamburg
- European Centre for Minority Issues (ECMI), Flensburg
- Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE), Bonn
- Nordic Institute for Asian Studies (NIAS), Kopenhagen
Resources / services
IREON permits cross-database searching in bibliographic databases and selected international treaties. In addition, users have access to the “European Thesaurus on International Relations and Area Studies”, which is available in 8 languages.
Where material is available on-line, users will have direct access (free or chargeable), or else, in the case of conventional resources, be provided with information on their availability wherever possible.
The content of the Gateway is continuously being expanded.
Currently the emphasis is on literature on international relations, security and foreign policy issues. The cross-database search covers
- the German database World Affairs Online
- the US database PAIS International
- a selection of international treaties on security issues
Further information on these resources can be found in the section "FAQ - Literature searches in IREON"
The first stage of expansion will see the expansion of the subject areas development policy and international party and trade-union
developments through the inclusion of
- the bibliographic database produced by InWEnt – Internationale Weiterbildung und Entwicklung gGmbH
- a section of the bibliographic database produced by the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES)
The second stage of expansion will enable the searching of tables of contents from journals relevant to the subject area international
relations and area studies. For this purpose, a section of the database "Online Contents" will be integrated in to the Gateway.
Further stages of expansion will include integration of the databases of our European cooperation partners focusing on foreign and security
policy, as well as the US political science database CSA Worldwide Political Science abstracts (WPSA).
In the medium term, we plan to provide further services, in particular in the area of personalisation (e.g. search profiles and alerting services)
Partners
In addition to the FIV members, we also cooperate with the following organisations:
On the provision of databases or sections thereof:
On information concerning holdings or availability:
On the technical platform:
We are a member of the vascoda registered association and IREON forms part of the interdisciplinary vascoda internet portal.