Report from the Webmanager/Chair for Electronic Communications

Report from the Webmanager/Chair for Electronic Communications
James Burton
SASweb

Web documents for the Society for Archaeological Sciences (SASweb) are now at a new address: http://www.wisc.edu/larch/sas/sas.htm. SASweb was previously using, gratis, server space of the University of Wisconsin’s Department of Information Technology ("DoIT") allocated to the Department of Anthropology (http://www.wisc.edu/anthropology/sas/sas.htm). Tight disk-quota restrictions and rapidly increasing use by the Anthropology Department required that we move our web documents to another location. SASweb documents are now available through DoIT server-space allocated to the Laboratory for Archaeological Chemistry. The SAS will also pay $20 monthly to cover costs for its use of the server facilities, including the disk quota and file maintenance by DoIT. Links to the old address will be rerouted to the new address, but everyone should change their ‘bookmarks’. If you maintain links to SASweb through your own html documents, please make the appropriate address changes in your own documents.

Web documents include society information, Bulletin contents, email addresses of the SAS membership, and extensive links to archaeometric facilities, publications, meetings, and other resources. In 1997 the compilation of abstracts from the 1996 International Archaeometry Conference was the most popular document on SASweb. Currently most popular are the contents of the SAS Bulletin, followed by links to archaeometric facilities.

The number of SASweb visitors increased in 1997 to several hundred visits per month and has remained fairly constant at that level in early 1998, with the greatest increase coming from visitors located outside the U.S. At least one third of the visitors (to the extent domain names can be resolved) are now from outside the United States, led by the U.K., Canada, and Australia. Because locations of visitors accessing SASweb from networks such as Prodigy and AOL cannot be resolved, the percentage of non-U.S. visitors is probably close to parity with visitors from within the U.S.

SASnet

SASnet is now in its eighth year, quite a long history by internet mail group standards. The subscriber base has grown from 437 in June 1997 to 471 in March 1998. Like SASweb usage, a significant fraction of subscribers, and posts to SASnet, are now from outside the United States. Although SASnet was set up as a moderated list to avoid the ‘flamewars’ that frequently spring up on other mailing lists, such has not been a problem on SASnet. No messages have had to be returned or edited because they were deemed abusive. SASnet has also received remarkably few inappropriate advertisements and ‘spams’. The major advantage to moderation has been the ability to filter messages accidentally posted to SASnet that were obviously intended for just a single individual. Although some mailing lists, including the original SASnet, could be configured so that replies to a message go only to the sender of the original message, the current SASnet is set up so that replies go to everyone on the list. Please keep that in mind when you use a ‘reply’ command - good advice for responding to any message, not just those from SASnet!

To subscribe, send the following command: "subscribe SASnet <your name>" to the list server address: listserver@relay.doit.wisc.edu.