| Introductory Guide to International Fisheries Law on the Internet This page is based on an article written for the International Journal of Marine and Coastal Law. Click here to view the full article. Contents Introduction World Wide Web Internet Mailing Lists Usenet News Groups End Note
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| Introduction
There is now an enormous amount of information available on the Internet, including a considerable volume on international fisheries law and management. Much of this information is valuable and useful, but much of it is useless. Finding the one thing you need can take hours, and there are usually no guarantees that the information you want is on the Internet in the first place. This Pathfinder is intended to serve as a guide to the information now available on the Internet relating to fisheries law and management. The Internet is a vast collection of inter-connected computers and computer networks around the world. The principal, and most user-friendly, component is the Web (the "World-Wide-Web" or "WWW"), although there are a number of other components to the Internet which, although perhaps less obvious, are nevertheless of great utility. One such component is, of course, e-mail which is fast becoming an essential communication tool for students, academics and practitioners alike. This guide seeks to consider briefly the range of resources on the Internet and provide some tips for finding what you are looking for. Most of the information available on the Internet can be found on the World-Wide Web, and virtually every link in this Pathfinder is a Web-link. Many organizations now have excellent websites with a lot of useful information. The UN and FAO both have good sites, containing up-to-date information and reproductions of various official documents. A growing number of international fisheries organizations also have their own websites as do a large number of non-governmental organizations. Many governments also have their own sites, although not all of these have developed fisheries pages and they are generally short on substantive material. The World-Wide Web is the most obvious face of the Internet, and is frequently used (incorrectly) when referring to the Internet. Strictly speaking, the Web refers to the universe of "hypertext servers" which are computer servers using the hypertext language which allows text, graphics, sound files, etc., to be mixed together to produce Web pages such as this one. Thus, most Web addresses (technically referred to as URLs or uniform resource locators) begin with the suffix http:// (meaning hypertext transfer protocol). More loosely, however, the Web is also used to refer to other types of resources that can be accessed in a similar way, such as gopher or FTP. These formats can be accessed using a Web browser (such as Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer) in the same way as http Web pages. (Gopher is a widely successful method of making menus of material available over the Internet, although it has largely been superseded by hypertext, which allows a much greater variety of formats; FTP, or file transfer protocol, is a common method of moving files between two Internet sites; a large number of Internet sites that have established publicly accessible repositories of material that can be obtained using FTP, usually called anonymous ftp servers because they can be logged into anonymously). Generally speaking, the most common way to search the Web (if you cannot find what you are looking for in the Pathfinder) is to use on of the general search services, such as Yahoo! or Excite. However, these can often be unproductive because of the vast amount of information contained on the Internet. Thus, even specific searches can produce thousands of sites. On the other hand, such searches might not produce any. More general searches can also often be unhelpful. For example, a search for "fish" produces lots of academic material of interest only to biologists, while one for "fishing" finds endless pages full of sport fishing holidays! For this reason, a better starting place is likely to be lists of "links" such as this Pathfinder or one of the other sites listed on Page 16, where other people have trawled through the Web for you on a particular subject. A mailing list, sometimes also called a discussion group, is a (usually automated) system that enables subscribers to send and receive messages to other subscribers, via a centralized e-mail address. Thus, subscribers may send messages to the mailing list e-mail address, whereupon the message is copied and sent to all of the other subscribers on the list. The most common kind of mailing list is called Listserv, after the company that provides the automated system, and sometimes mailing lists are referred to also as Listservs. Mailing lists are of a considerable potential utility, as they allow people with many different kinds of e-mail access to participate in discussions altogether and can be an extremely useful if you want information on a certain subject, or an answer to a particular question, because such lists provide access to potentially large numbers of like-minded people. Generally, anyone on a list is welcome to send a message to start conversation about topics likely to be of interest to the whole group, or to pose a research or reference question to the group. The utility of a list ultimately depends on the number and fields of expertise of subscribers, and they sometimes have the drawback of filling up you e-mail inbox with large numbers of messages which may not always be of interest or relevance to you (the larger lists, such as Fishfolk, for example, can easily produce twenty or more messages in a day), but in general mailing lists are potentially an extremely useful tool. As far as fisheries are concerned there is not currently a list dedicated solely to fisheries law, although in the near future it is intended to set up from this site the OceanLaw list, which will cover marine environmental law issues in general, including fisheries. For lists which might nevertheless be of interest, see Page 15 of the Pathfinder. Usenet News Groups (or discussion groups) Usenet is a world-wide system of discussion groups, with comments passed among hundreds of thousands of machines. There are over 10,000 discussion areas, called newsgroups, which cover an enormous range of topics. Despite their name, newsgroups are not generally news services, but bulletin-board systems allowing you to take part in discussions on the topic of the group. Thus, messages can be posted to the newsgroup and can be read by any other person which "subscribes" to that list. To "subscribe," you will need a newsgroup browser, such as Netscape Collabra. Newsgroups are therefore, like mailing lists, a potentially useful tool, because they create a forum for information and problem sharing as well as discussion. The main difference is that messages remain in the newsgroup and are not delivered to you e-mail address. This has the advantage that your e-mail does not become overwhelmed with large numbers of messages of little interest, as can happen with mailing lists, but also means that newsgroups can often be a little stagnant because they are neglected by subscribers. Furthermore, as far as fisheries law is concerned, there does not appear to be any newsgroups dedicated to fisheries law or any other law of the sea issue. Sites which might be of interest are listed on Page 15 of the Pathfinder. Although there is now an enormous amount of information available on the internet, it is still a long way, at least as far as fisheries law is concerned, from being a real alternative to the more traditional sources of information. Although there is increasingly more and more substantive information appearing (notably on the UN and FAO sites) and international fisheries organizations websites are beginning to appear, much of the information is not much more than background or introductory to any particular subject. Nevertheless, the quantity and the quality of information is continually improving and the Internet should now be regarded as a useful resource to supplement the more traditional sources of fisheries legal information and should always be included in research work. |
