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The CSA Web site has been up and running for a good while. It began in 1995 and has grown steadily since then. Use of the various resources at the site has also grown steadily, but use recently hit a milestone that seems worthy of remark. In the first full week of October, 1999, the site served more than one thousand pages a day for the first time. Usage has fluctuated since that time, of course, but the thousand-page milestone was broken again for one week each in November and December and for two weeks in January. It is gratifying to see so much usage of this resource.
Some of the statistics generated by our analysis package may be of interest to readers. In each of the last few months the site has served more than 1500 distinct files. Users have made requests around the clock, with the fewest requests coming between one and three a.m., local time, and the largest number in the late morning, just before noon. Users come from all over the world with the largest number of users, not surprisingly, from the U.S. and Canada, and many from Western Europe and Australia. More than seventy countries are generally represented when the monthly statistics are generated.
The single most popular Web page (other than gateway pages) is the AutoCAD tutorial. It has been requested more than 900 times per month in the last few months. Although that popularity may stem from users needing to access the same file multiple times, it also suggests that there are not many similar resources on the Web. The second most popular item is the page listing archaeological projects. That is fitting, since that page was chosen as a Scout Report Selection for 19 October 1999. (The Scout Report - see http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/report/socsci/current/index.html - is a biweekly Web publication of Internet resources in the social sciences that are deemed to be of interest. The selections are chosen by "librarians and content specialists in the given area of study.")
The new lantern slides web pages (see "Lantern Slides of Classical Antiquity Project," CSA Newsletter, Vol. XII, No. 2, Fall, 1999) have been used very little, and this has come as a surprise to CSA personnel. Although the number of slides is modest (about 150 total slides), the images are old enough to be of unusual interest. We hope readers will make more use of these images in the future (www.csanet.org/lanterns).
The Bryn Mawr Electronic Resources Review pages have been accessed often, suggesting that the reviews are valued, even though the number of reviews available has not grown as quickly as had been hoped.
Next Article: Web-Assisted Session at SAA Annual Meeting
Table of Contents for the Winter, 2000 issue of the CSA Newsletter (Vol. XII, no. 3)
Table of Contents for all CSA Newsletter issues on the Web