IIAS was founded in 1993 with the aim of encouraging the pursuit of Asian Studies in the Social Sciences and Humanities, both nationally and internationally. It runs programmes on research, post-doctoral education and information networking. It plans to develop a European Database for Asian Studies (EDAS), covering research in progress: the section on the Netherlands has been completed, and is available on the WWW site. It holds maintains a list of job vacancies in the field of Asian studies. All these activities are documented in the IIAS Newsletter, which is available on their WWW, gopher or post (3 times per year)