African Studies homepage praise

While some students have impressive World Wide Web home pages, most have probably not been accessed by people in Japan, Austria and Egypt. But users in those countries, and many more, have taken advantage of the internationally acclaimed home page of the University's African Studies Program. Outreach Coordinator Ali Dinar, who runs the home page, said that it was highly praised by the Library of Congress as the first resource on the Web devoted solely to African studies. Dinar said the page was created on PennInfo three years ago by Julie Sisskind, the former outreach coordinator, and was moved to a Web server last August. "Due to dedicated work and originality, we are now the number one site for resources for African studies worldwide," Dinar said. Among the materials on the home page is a "K-12 Africa Guide," which contains information used for classroom instruction about countries throughout Africa. This semester, Dinar is giving training sessions to area teachers and librarians to educate them about the K-12 Africa Guide. According to Dinar, the Multimedia Archive has received more document requests than any other area of the home page. The Archive includes various images of Africa, including flags, maps, artifacts and images of wildlife, among other items. Dinar pointed to the number of documents requested from the home page as evidence of its growth. In August 1994, a total of 18,367 documents were requested. Last month, the number of document requests was up to 97, 273. Dinar pointed to documents provided from a conference held earlier this month in Ethiopia as an example of the home page's accessibility. Abstracts of all the papers presented at the conference were given to the home page, making some papers available to users before actual publication. Full texts of all the papers have been sent to Dinar, and he is processing them to make them available on-line.

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