The Library of Congress has made available over the Internet electronic versions of 71 Country Studies in the highly regarded Army Area Handbook Series. These electronic books can be accessed at http://memory.loc.gov/frd/cs/cshome.html.
The series, which has been published for more than 40 years, is produced by the Library's Federal Research Division under an agreement with the Department of the Army. It consists of 109 titles and covers 150 sovereign states and 15 dependencies. A typical book in the series - which is intended to provide an introduction to individual countries - contains five chapters describing and analyzing its history, society, economy, government and politics, and national security. Books encompassing two or more countries or an entire region contain maps, charts, photographs, illustrations, tables, bibliographies, a glossary and an index.
Published books in the series are widely distributed and used by government agencies both in the United States and abroad. In addition, titles in the series are sold by the Superintendent of Documents and are widely used by public, school and university libraries as well as business and the general public. Over the years, the Army has arranged for the distribution of more than 1.76 million books to U.S. government users, and the Superintendent of Documents has sold nearly 1.14 million books to the public. More than 232,000 books have been distributed to designated federal depository libraries throughout the United States, and more than 51,000 microform books have been sold by the Defense Technical Information Center and the National Technical Information Service. Newly published titles are consistently among the top 100 titles cataloged by academic and public libraries in the United States each year, and Country Studies have been among the most popular items distributed by the Exchange and Gift Division of the Library of Congress.
As currently configured, the electronic versions of the Country Studies now available on the Internet contain the bulk of the published books, specifically all front matter and all chapters in the main body of the text. Tables, bibliographies, the glossary and other appendixes are not included in the initial offering but will be added in the near future. Illustrations, photographs, maps and charts will also be added later. Updated versions of some existing electronic versions of Country Studies (e.g., Turkey and combined Germany) and electronic versions of additional Country Studies will be posted as updates of more books in the series are produced.
The new Internet versions of the Country Studies augment the Library's online offerings of photographs, documents, sound recordings and films as well as the library's catalog.