Let’s Talk CIAO with Dan LoPreto

Hi! I’m Dan LoPreto, the editor of Columbia International Affairs Online (CIAO), a research database published by Columbia University Press in collaboration with the Columbia University Libraries. I’m excited to talk about CIAO and answer any questions you may have. 

CIAO is the world’s largest online resource of documents and articles devoted to research, analysis, and scholarship on a wide range of topics in international relations, including: international politics, security studies, international political economy, diplomatic practice, humanitarian law, global governance, development studies, environmental studies, and more.

With more than 500,000 pages aggregated from 300 publishing institutions, CIAO is a unique and valuable archive and cross-searchable library of articles from government research organizations, independent think tanks, university analysis centers, and scholarly journals. The Economist Intelligence Unit also supplies comprehensive country surveys, including in-depth political and economic data.

More than 500 institutions currently subscribe to CIAO. University libraries, high schools, government agencies, and global research institutions all benefit from this ever-growing resource with thousands of new documents added each year. Check here to find out if your institution subscribes. If they don’t, ask your librarian to contact us for a trial or subscription.

We’ve made several important changes and upgrades to CIAO in the past few years. We’ve built an entirely new website, one that features downloadable PDFs of full articles, e-books, and videos. We’ve also added more than 9,600 new articles and papers in the past three years. Worldwide usage of CIAO is growing and in 2019 our site received 340,000 page views. 

As the new editor for CIAO, I am gathering more English-language scholarship published outside of the United States to provide a truly international resource for students and scholars at our subscribing institutions, who are based in over fifty countries. On this front, I’m excited to say that we’ve built more than 40 partnerships in just the last six months, and we now work with a number of terrific content providers spanning the globe, including:

• • Institute of International Relations, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil)
  • Advocates Coalition for Development and Environment (Uganda)
  • Körber-Stiftung (Germany)
  • Oxford Centre for Global History (United Kingdom)
  • Botswana Institute for Development Policy Analysis (Botswana)
  • Centre for Trade and Economic Integration, Graduate Institute (Switzerland)
  • Ghana Center for Democratic Development (Ghana)
  • School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, American University in Cairo (Egypt)
  • Dejusticia (Colombia)
  • Argentine Council for International Relations (Argentina)

CIAO has been active for more than twenty years. I’m thrilled and honored to serve as the editor of what Library Journal calls a “true gem in the e-resources market.” Please contact me or my colleague Herbert Plummer for details about our affordable, sliding-scale subscription rates. 

If you have any questions about CIAO, please email me or message us through our Twitter account. If you would like to receive monthly updates and information about CIAO, please consider signing up for our newsletter. Lastly, if you would like to gain temporary (30-day) access to CIAO in order to explore the website, please contact me and I’d be happy to share credentials with you.

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