NACSIS started an International Joint Study with Grant-in-Aid of the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and Culture, Japan for 1994-1996 titled "Feasibility Study of International Exchange of Scholarly Information (Principal investigator: Professor Kinji Ono)".
In conjunction with this joint study, the NACSIS Thai Project was initiated to supervise a feasibility study on the international exchange of academic information between Japan and Thailand.
The mission of the project is to investigate the methodology and clarify the mechanism for promoting the international exchange of academic information in the Asia-Pacific Region and to report on the evaluation of NACSIS services through the trial use of NACSIS-IR, NACSIS-CAT, NACSIS-ELS and other electronic information services.
On March 2nd and 3rd, the International Workshop on Academic Information Network and Systems (WAINS'95) was held in Bangkok. The telecommunication and information technology, marketplace of the Asia-Pacific region is growing fast. In order to establish the information resource sharing mechanism between the NACSIS Thai project member and NACSIS via Internet, the workshop and demonstration was planned.
Through this WAINS'95 workshop, we are pursuing the best way to unite our efforts in the Asia-Pacific region and to promote research and development with regard to future perspectives.
The top scientists and engineers in the field of networks and libraries not only in Thailand but also from the UK, USA, Australia and other Asian countries gathered there to listen to the keynote speech, report and discuss the various problems that confront us. We found some possible solutions in the course of our discussion.
NACSIS also demonstrated the NACSIS-IR, NACSIS-CAT services using Internet via the USA. the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and Culture of Japan, decided to provide a 2 Mbps circuit between Tokyo and Bangkok in order to interconnect SINET and Internet in Thailand starting this October.
This will promote joint international study and R&D experiments aimed at developing solutions for future academic information systems and networks on the road to the Global Information Infrastructure (GII).
