VOL. 23, NO. 1	SEPTEMBER 5, 1997

 first-of-its-kind online publication by Columbia University Press has been recognized as a solution to the problem facing university presses: Growing publishing costs in a shrinking market for scholarly books.

  This online publication—Columbia International Affairs Online, or CIAO—was featured in a recent New York Times article shortly before its official launching last weekend.

  "I feel very, very passionately that we should not abandon scholars or scholarly publishing," Kate Wittenberg, editor-in-chief of C.U. Press, told the Times in the Aug. 24 article.

  CIAO was created by C.U. Press in conjunction with Columbia University Libraries and Academic Computing Information Systems. CIAO is funded by a three-year, $360,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to evaluate the potential of online technology for scholarly communication.

  CIAO will be available to universities, libraries and other institutions only by subscription, but a free demonstration site may be found at http://www.ciaonet.org.

  The work published by CIAO is expansive, covering all regions of the globe and topics such as diplomacy, security, global politics, global religion, nationalism, terrorism and political economy.

  CIAO features full-text online books, book summaries, links to over 150 sites, journal abstracts, and a calendar of meetings, conferences, seminars, and research projects. The site also brings together working papers, reports, and conference proceedings.

  "This is the bargain of the century," Steven Weber, a U.C.-Berkeley professor of political science, said in the Times article. Weber said he plans to subscribe because CIAO's maximum $1,200 fee is much less than buying actual books and journals.

  The full text of documents published on CIAO is easily searchable by author, title, subject, date, keyword and sponsoring institution. The user can print, download, and save material, and can access an article's author biography, footnotes, bibliography, and graphics.