July 1999

Overview: Latvia

1. General overview on WWW sites

The results of the analysis of the Latvian market for information services (1997) show that various on-line information sources including WWW sites are the most significant electronic information sources in Latvia today. Real progress in creation of WWW sites took off in 1995, a couple of years after the launch of Internet environment. Many organisations (and private persons too) have been involved in the creation of WWW sites, academic, government and commercial institutions.

Today all Internet service providers offer their servers for hosting the web sites. Usually the customersí websites of modest size are hosted without additional charge, but the commercial offers also are relatively cheap and available for all active companies. PR - companies also provides services for maintenance of the web sites. On the other hand, hosting of the web sites does not cover the expenses of the providers and cannot bring profit to make the business possible taking into account the technical and marketing investments, therefore is considered as an additional service.

Content and informative value of the web sites are very different. The most informative sites contain a wide spectrum of information†-†general information on Latvia, statistics, current news, survey of some field (economy, education, etc.), and links to data bases. An example of such site is the Bank of Latvia's (www.bank.lv) web-site, who updates the currency rates and other monetary information every day. Green Pages for Latvia (www.zl.lv) and Lursoft (www.lursoft.lv) WWW sites contain information about the companies, WWW site of the Latvian Academic Library (www.acadlib.lv) contains on-line request forms for users, links to the library catalogue and number of bibliographic, factographic, full text and full image information sources. Such sites are widely used for information purposes.

Other sites present only information on respective institutions, on research and educational activities of academic institutions, on products and services of commercial enterprises and contact information of administrative bodies. Objective of these sites is to advertise activities of the institution and to promote its major business. Personal sites mainly describe hobbies of authors (sport, music etc.) and sometimes their private business.

The largest and most successful projects of this kind have been set up by the state or business organisations for their own use and by their own resources without recruiting professionals of web development companies.

Rather many web sites are created with support of various foreign organisations. The most active in this direction is Soros Foundation Latvia (www.sfl.lv ) that has financed websites of many schools and other non-profit institutions.

Several years ago, all information in Latviaís web sites was offered only in English. Today the situation is different since there are more Latvian people that use Web-sites regularly. Some sites are also offered in multilingual versions, for example, the Gallery of the Academic Network LATNET (www.gallery.lv) informs the global web users about the Latvia's art in English, French and Spanish languages.

The overall information about the web sites in Latvia can be foundnd in the websites www.lv or www.all.lv that contains quite full listings of Latvia's WWW sites.

2. WWW sites indicators

Sources:
- for total number of information sources of the Central Statistical Bureau, they contain information on the end of 1997. Detailed information on the year 1998 is not available yet.
- for statistics of websites – statistics of the Academic Computer Network LATNET, end of 1998.