The first of a series on Internet resources. We start with the news.

Most people are amazed when they learn how much Indonesian material is on the Internet. Take the news. Junkies like me used to lead a miserable life waiting for our copy of the weekly magazine to arrive. Not any more. We can now get news and more news every day on-line.

An easy way of getting it is to subscribe to a mailing list. There are quite a few such lists around. I subscribed to one namedapakabar by sending an email to John MacDougall atapakabar@clark.net. This resulted in a steady stream of news, discussion, book reviews, and more, written by (generally) knowledgeable people all over the world, coming daily to my in-box. Much is in English, a lot in Indonesian.

Dollars

Does it cost - that is, apart from what you pay your Internet Service Provider? It depends. Apakabar comes in two forms. For a small voluntary contribution of US$25, or for nothing if you are Indonesian, you can be on indonesia-l, and get mostly the discussion. The material is gathered from all the major Indonesian news sites elsewhere on the Net, usually spiced up by comment.

For a bit more money (US$120 a year), you can be onindonesia-p, and get a much fuller anthology of news in Indonesian and English from public sources scattered around the Net. That includes Indonesian dailies like Republika.

Two Web sites

If you're prepared to spend the time, you could of course hunt down this news yourself by looking up any of a variety of Web sites. Without going into detail let me just mention two. First, and best if you want to read the newspaper in Indonesian, is the Indonesian Homepage in Canada:http://www.umanitoba.ca/indonesian/homepage.html. Links from there lead you to the daily papers Kompas, Republika and Surabaya Post, the weekly news magazine Gatra, the official news agency Antara, and news bulletins of the private TV channel RCTI, to name but a few.

Do you remember Tempo magazine, Indonesia's premier news weekly banned in 1994? It has risen from the ashes, reincarnated as a Web site, and can be reached from this homepage! It still looks more like a small collection of articles than a magazine, but the quality is excellent. Information Minister Harmoko has said he has no objections to the Internet version of the magazine he once banned. This alone will drive many more Indonesians than the current 20 000 or so to the Net.

The second major site for news junkies isgopher://gopher.igc.apc.org:2998/7REG-INDONESIA. As the name suggests this is a gopher site, but you can reach it just as well if not better with your Web browser. This is the largest searchable database of news about Indonesia available free of charge on the Internet. The archive goes back to 1991. It is very easy to use. Punching in one keyword, or more than one linked by Boolean operators, brings up a list of items. An indispensable tool, whether you're writing a tut paper or a book.

Gerry van Klinken