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Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso celebrates its first ten years with the launch of a new portal, which improves significantly the information services offered to the international readership. A simple English section of our website becomes an independent English-language portal
Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso (OBC) celebrates its first ten years – ten years of information and analysis on South Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and the world of international cooperation. Initially addressed to the Italian public (with 12,000 articles and over 4,000 readers per day), over the years Osservatorio has given greater and greater attention to its international and Anglophone readers.
Our tenth birthday is a moment full of meaning, and one that we plan to celebrate with many projects and events. Today, we do it by launching the new portal in Italian (www.balcanicaucaso.org), which implies first and foremost a significant improving of the information services offered to the international readership. What has been a simple section of our website is now an independent English-language portal: www.balcanicaucaso.org/eng.
The new homepage presents a more immediate, user-friendlier design: an expanded list of all the areas that we cover, a central space for the latest news, and two boxes devoted to our multimedia products and international cooperation issues. Furthermore, you will find many analyses and dossiers as well as a column with surfing suggestions, links to partner organisations, and institutional information.
Thus, it is finally possible to browse by issue or geographical area and the multimedia section offers videos, audio-materials, and over a hundred photo galleries – all with new and improved visualisation instruments.
Thanks to the keywords, every news article, analysis, photo gallery, and video will be accompanied by suggestions in the right column for further related resources. This will make it easier to find what has already been published on a specific theme and surf our growing English-language archive.
All the internal sections of the website have been renovated. For example, a thematic tree guarantees a quick and thorough surfing through news archives, galleries, videos, and audio materials on subjects ranging from the European Union to minority rights, from decentralised cooperation to cinema.
In addition, an effective bulk-mail system will soon be introduced: every reader will be able to choose to be notified by e-mail when an article is published in a chosen section. Other news portals, bloggers, or website owners will also be able to easily import our RSS feeds and thus provide their own readers with instant updates on our publications.
On the other hand, what is not going to change is our Creative Commons policy on our materials: no limitations for accessing recent and archive materials. Furthermore, all articles published by Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso, when not specified otherwise, remain available for reproduction in any format, provided the source (including the original one for translations), the link to the website or the whole article (for syntheses or excerpts), and the author's name are cited.
Our new portal going online is, however, just the start: we will be keeping you updated with further news in the next few months. Please notify us of any problem with the new website to segreteria@balcanicaucaso.org. We thank you for the attention you pay to our work and we hope you will enjoy reading and surfing on our new website!
The staff of Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso
