REESweb is a detailed annotated guide to information resources related Russian and East European Studies. It is part of the WWW Virtual Library, a collection of detailed subject-oriented guides to Internet resources maintained by topic experts at various sites around the world and coordinated by the WWW Organization (W3O).
REESweb's entry page has links to indices of indexed materials by discipline, type of site (i.e., classed by function: document repositories, interactive databases, software archives, etc.). The remainder of the starting page is devoted to a list of resources newly added in the past several months, with links to previous "What's New" pages.
Each page contains dozens of links to WWW, gopher, and other Internet sites. Each link is described briefly (descriptions run from a brief sentence to a full paragraph). Most descriptions are sufficiently detailed that one doesn't have to visit the site to have a feel for the content. Each individual WWW document in REESweb has a table of contents with internal links to specific sections of that page. Materials are listed under more than one heading; thus a document repository with items on the 1991 coup will be found both under Russian resources and document repositories.
This web site offers a wealth of information, and the multiple layers of organization (by region, by topic, by type of document, etc.), provide different access points to the same information. The amount of information presented is almost overwhelming--which is the main drawback to these pages. REESweb might be easier to use if materials were broken down into smaller chunks. The topical pages are arranged according to broad strokes ("Language, Literature, Music, Art, Culture", for example, or "History, Geography, Sociology"). The resulting pages are lengthy, containing over 100 links in many lines of text. With no means of searching for a particular item, either by title or by keyword, finding a specific document could well prove frustrating. A possible improvement on the organization might be to arrange it according to country and region, with each more narrowly-defined topic presented as an individual section and with resources bearing on more than one area cross-listed.
The scale of this guide aside, the actual content is quite informative. The explanations of each document, ranging in length from a few to several hundred, are helpful and informative. The writing style is not consistent, though, and it would seem that some of the descriptions were provided by or adapted from the cited document. However, since citations are not provided, it is not clear who is responsible for this text.
On the whole, though, this is an excellent effort at organizing the multitude of information resources in a rapidly growing field. The frequently updated "What's New" pages make it possible to track the development of new resources as they appear. multitude of diverse information resources into a comprehensive whole. REESweb is clearly one of the best guides, if not the best, to Internet-based resources on Russia and Eastern Europe.