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Last Updated: 2004, July 2
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Timeline of the Scholarly Societies Project
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Date |
Development |
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1993, October
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The notion of creating a set of links to gophers of scholarly societies
was discussed by the Internet Resources Committee (IRC) of the University
of Waterloo Library.
It was pointed out that, in addition to the usefulness of such a resource
to the UW campus, it would represent a resource that the IRC could give to
the Internet in exchange for the valuable resources to which the UW
Library gopher made
links. The IRC approved the project.
Later that month a collection of about a half-dozen resources had been
assembled.
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| 1994, February |
By February 1994, after several months of performing Veronica searches,
and monitoring announcements of new gophers, the number of resources was
increased to about twenty. At this point, the collection was considered
rich enough to be announced to the public. Announcements were sent out
over various listservs and newsgroups. Some readers of this announcement
evidently cross-posted it to other listservs or newsgroups, so that the
total audience was even wider than originally expected. As a result,
Project staff were notified of several new resources.
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| 1994, Summer |
By the summer of 1994, a WWW version of the Scholarly Societies Project
was being created.
After the first few months of the summer of 1994, the ratio of gophers to
webpages in the Project was about 2:1, and remained so for a couple of
months. But by November 1994, the ratio began to approach 1:1; the number
of new webpages was continuing at a steady rate, but the number of new
gophers had slowed considerably.
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| 1994, November (late) |
The web version of the project was announced to the public over several
listservs and
newsgroups. Soon after, Project staff were occupied in a flurry of
correspondence with readers of the announcement. As a result, a number of
new and interesting resources (virtually all webpages) were added.
Other information on the period from 1993 to late 1994 is found in
Development of the Scholarly Societies Project.
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| 1995 -1996 |
The Project went through a
period of rapid growth, passing from 115 websites at the
end of January, 1995 to 968 websites at the
end of October, 1996 (less than 2 years later).
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| 1995, Summer |
In 1995, work on constructing a database containing all the
information in
the HTML files was begun.
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| 1996 (late) |
The database was completed, but it was not yet made available to the
public via a search engine.
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| 1996, November 20 |
Late on the afternoon of Wednesday, November 20, 1996, a
milestone in the Scholarly Societies Project was passed when
the Editor added the 1000th society to the Scholarly
Societies Project.
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| 1997, October 22 |
On 1997, October 22, the Editor announced that
No Additional Websites Without Permanent URLs Will Be Added.
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| 1998 February 6 |
The editor announced that a
Database with Search Engine was Now Available.
This represented a major improvement in access to the resources in the
Project.
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| 1999 (Summer) |
The Editor began to create a sub-project entitled the
Repertorium Veterrimarum Societatum Litterariarum
(Inventory of the Oldest Scholarly Societies), to contain society
information likely to be of special interest to historians.
This sub-project was restricted to societies founded up to and including
the year 1799.
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| 2000, Spring |
The Project acquired its own domain name,
www.scholarly-societies.org.
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| 2000, December 22 |
The Editor added the 2000th society website
to the Project.
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| 2001, Summer |
The Editor learned how to use the
Unicode Standard
to encode society names that require either the use of
diacritics, or non-Latin scripts, if they are to be properly displayed.
By the end of Summer, over 130 society names had been thus encoded in
non-Latin scripts.
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| 2001, July |
The Editor added the
By Country
area, to make it easy to retrieve the records for societies based in
particular countries, or other geographical
areas.
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| 2001, September |
The Editor added the
By
Language
area, to make it easy to retrieve the records for society websites with a
significant amount of text in
particular languages.
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| 2002, April |
For five months, beginning in November 2001 and ending in April 2002, all
regular maintenance on the Project was suspended as the Editor undertook a
review and re-assignment of subject
headings used in about two-thirds of
the societies in the Project. Because of this, (1) the total
number of subject headings increased by a half, from 46 to
70, and (2) the average subject-file size decreased.
As a result of this, the Project now uses a larger proportion of more
specific subject headings than previously, so that on average the subject
files load more quickly and are easier to browse through.
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| 2002, September 13 |
The Editor added the 3000th society website
to the Project.
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| 2003, May 9 |
The Editor unveiled the new
Search Engine
running on Cold Fusion.
This introduced a number of improvments, which are explained at
A New Search Engine, A New Look: Phase 1.
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| 2004, July 2 |
The Editor added the 4000th society
to the Project.
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