Interactive Central Asia Resource Project

The Interactive Central Asia Resource Project is perhaps the most comprehensive index of Central Asian-related resources available on the Internet. ICARP has more than 500 separate links. What makes the site especially useful is that for each link there is a brief but informative annotation which provides a sense of the resources available as well as background on the maintainer of the site and how frequently it is updated.

Surprisingly, given the size and overall breadth of the site, ICARP is not a project of a large, well-funded organization. It is a labor-of-love by Anthony and Rebecca Bichel. Anthony is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Hawaii in Political Science and Rebecca is a second-year law student at Washington and Lee University who seems to specialize in Central Asian bibliographies.

ICARP consists of more than a dozen separate pages. For Central Asia as a whole and for each country in the region there is a page which has annotated links, divided into major categories such as: Culture and Language, Health and Environmental Issues, Politics and Economics, General Information, and Travel and Commercial Services. The latter includes book stores and shipping companies. On the Central Asia regional page there is also a subsection titled �Islam.� Most of the links are to resources that are academic, business, or government-related. But it�s not all business--from one of the links you can hear sound clips from the current album of �Yalla,� a pop group from Tashkent.

As one might expect of a �meta-index� like ICARP, there are also pages which list Listservs and News Sources, Archives and Publications, and there is a Central Asia Bibliography. The Bichels have also added categories that many sites of this kind don�t have, including:

Institutes and Organizations

Links to around 20 (mostly) international and academic organizations which include Central Asia as part of their work.

Regional Influences

An introduction to Internet resources that focus on the areas around Central Asia, including: the Caucasus, Russia, China, Mongolia, Tibet, Xinjiang, Iran, and Turkey.

Political Parties

So far the Bichels only have information on political parties in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. But for both these countries they have included generally brief descriptions of six or seven political parties and movements.

Experts

A list of e-mail addresses and one-sentence bios for 100 people with a professional interest in Central Asia. Most are either scholars or people working on NGO projects in Central Asia.

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