Preparing for MAMUN...

Research is the key to a successful and fun conference.  It is a staff philosophy to help the participants in their research as much as possible before the conference while letting the delegates work things out on their own at the conference.

Here are some tips and links to help you in your research.

First of all, contact your embassy!  Email, write, or call them explaining what you are doing and that you would like as much information on policy as you can.  Send them a copy of our agenda as well, this will give them a more specific idea of what to give you. Not all embassies will respond, and some will respond better then others, but whatever you get back is worth it.  

To see the homepages of various member states go here: http://www.un.int/index-en/webs.html.

Once you do that, RESEARCH THE TOPICS!  Don't worry so much about internal facts and such yet.  The more you know about your committee topics, the better.  Print off and read resolutions that have already been passed on the issue.  http://www.un.org/documents/

It wouldn't hurt to look around the rest of the UN site at www.un.org.

If you are stuck, or if you want some more personal advice go to the discussion board, you can ask the staff or other delegates questions about your topic.

Go to the Delegate Handbook for more preparation ideas and articles.

Here are a list of various links and their description.

Research on the internet can be both a dream and a nightmare for the model UN delegate.  While accessing information is easier than ever, the challenge to sort through unreliable sources gets tougher every day.   While there’s nothing wrong with using information from a site that extols the virtues of your country at the expense of the truth, you should be aware that you might be inviting a certain type of response from other delegates during the debate. 

The Internet Public Library, a growing resource for use by students on many topics, does an excellent job screening websites before they are included in their list of resources. Their mission is to create a resource that students can confidently use. Visit http://www.ipl.org/

We believe you’ll be using this resource for a lot more academic endeavors besides MAMUN.

• Use this site to access voting records and speeches made by your country on a wide variety of issues.  You can search by topic, date, and country name to locate key positions.  The site runs a little slow sometimes and you will need to be patient as you search through the massive collection of UN speeches, but some of the best preparation materials can be found here. unbisnet.un.org
  

• This link will get you to a subject index on the UN's web page.  It's organized by general topic areas, but you can find recent documents on a wide variety of topics. http://www.un.org/ga/63/agenda/
  

• An outstanding starting point for delegates is the Library of Congress website which has well-researched links on every country in the world in their Portals of the World section. Locating your country is easy and you’ll have a large number of sources with which to begin your research. Visit http://loc.gov/rr/international/portals.html.
  

• A second section of the Library of Congress site will be useful to many delegations, but not all. The Country Studies section came originally from the United States military and contains detailed background material on about 100 counties around the world. The Library is attempting to build the database, but you should definitely check out http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/ to see if your country is among those available.

• The University of Minnesota Human Rights Libraries offers one of the most comprehensive lists of documents and treaties on the web. http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/treaties.htm

• The British Broadcasting Company (BBC) has one of the best news sites available. There is extensive background material on many countries and issues. They do a particularly good job on countries that used to be British colonies. Visit www.bbc.co.uk often during your MAMUN preparation.

• Alphabetic Index of Websites of the United Nations System of Organizations. http://www.unsystem.org

• The daily news summary covering the United Nations, global affairs and key international issues. http://www.unfoundation.org/unwire/

• The United Nations Association of the United States of America (UNA-USA) is a very valuable site. http://www.unausa.org/

• More to come...if you have any link suggestions please send them to our webmaster...