African Studies site racks up a million 'hits'

The center marked a million hits to its renowned homepage on Africa with a party yesterday. While some homepages at the University can claim that their Web sites are widely used and comprehensive, one page has recently backed its claim up with hard data -- the homepage of the African Studies Center. Yesterday, the center held a party celebrating "One Million in a Month." The event commemorated the one million "hits," or requested documents, on their Web site in the month of March alone. The site, hailed by the Library of Congress as the "most comprehensive on-line source for information about Africa," is currently maintained by Ali Ali-Dinar, the outreach coordinator of the African Studies Center. Ali-Dinar said he was "very pleased" with the large increase in interest for the Web site. He added that "it's just part of the job to reach out to the outer community and provide a way to access information to students." By putting the information on line, it "could reach people all over the globe," he added. Indeed, Ali-Dinar could not help smiling as he described the exponential growth of hits to the Web site. The site got only 799 hits in March 1993 and 632,128 requested documents in March 1997, he said. Ali-Dinar attributed the tremendous growth to the user-friendly nature of the Web site, as well as the extremely informative content of the homepage. "I'm always thinking of people with limited Internet capabilities, and if we make it hard for them, they'll just go look at another Web site," Ali-Dinar explained. At the party, Ali-Dinar, joined by several of his colleagues and friends, discussed the history of the site. The Web site was started in March of 1993 by Julie Sisskind, a School of Arts and Sciences graduate student and the former outreach coordinator of the center. At that time, the site was located on PennInfo, the comprehensive information bank that preceded the current Web server. In August 1994, the center became the first organization to move its page from PennInfo to the currently-used University Web server. The responsibilities of maintaining the site were then taken over by Ali-Dinar. Since then, the number of links provided on the site have quickly increased. The links include a kindergarten through grade 12 "Africa Guide," which provides an electronic guide for children to African resources on the Internet, as well as a multimedia archive of images of Africa and African programs and resources at Penn. According to Ali-Dinar, the most popular links are the "country-specific" sites, in particular those containing information about Nigeria and Egypt. This informative and comprehensive Web site was dubbed "the source for African information all over the world," by Sandra Barnes, director of the African Studies Program. Among the students in attendance at the celebration was James Wilson, a 37-year-old advanced graduate student from Princeton University. Wilson, who is studying the African language Kikuyu at Penn, noted that "it's a really important thing to be connected to an African service that brings information to the world."