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Home ›› About Speciation ›› Speciation News

Three years EVISA Newsletter - Four years EVISA website - Time to take stock

(16.12.2007)

Three years serving you with the EVISA Speciation Newsletter and four years of operating the EVISA web site, this is a good reason to proudly look back for a short moment.

What has been started as a European funded project nearly five years ago has meanwhile been established as the primary site for all those that seek for information, know-how and solutions with respect to speciation analysis.

The passing year was a very active year for EVISA and we would like to take the time to review it briefly. The year started with the opening of our regional office in Münster/Germany. It was our hope that the office in Germany would enhance the cooperation of EVISA with one of its highly supportive members (University of Münster) on the one side, and improve the contact between EVISA and its customers on the other hand. The activities of the year have shown that these hopes could be realized. One of the outcomes of the cooperation of EVISA and the University of Münster was the Workshop "TraceSpec 2007" that was jointly organized together with IAEAC. A report from the very successful workshop that attracted scientists from more than 30 countries is available on the EVISA server (see: EVISA News, September 17: Experts in Speciation Analysis came together in Münster).

EVISA was present at many conferences, trade shows and workshops with presentations, information booths or discussion fora represented by at least one of its active members. To name only the activities of the German Office, EVISA Managing Director Michael Sperling gave an invited presentation at the CANAS'07 conference in Constance, Germany (March) and presented EVISA with an information booth at the Spectr'Atom 07 in Pau, France (Mai).

Another activity of EVISA is the ongoing development of EVISA's website. We made considerable efforts to improve the site not only with respect to content quantity (the server now hosts more than 10,000 pages) but also with respect to content quality and ease of use. With such a high number of pages, we felt obliged to develop and establish special tools that help the users to find the relevant information in the most efficient way.

The following features have been installed during the year:

In February we added Web 2.0 features to our database system. Whenever the user starts typing his search term, the server will already propose the available records.
In April we added new Link pages to our Link database, in order to improve the access to information for the elements Co, Mo, Pt, Tl, V and Zn.
In June we started the new series "Tools for speciation" that summarizes the available resources for different techniques for speciation analysis.
In July we established the glossarization feature for all content pages (documents, news, events). This feature allows the user to view the explanation of all terms within a page that are included in our glossary.
In August we enhanced the glossarization to the EVISA databases on Scientists, Companies, Materials, Components and Instruments. We also established the cross-referencer to the glossary that shows the occurrence of a term within the whole EVISA website.
In October we opened a new powerful search engine that allows to search both very specifically but also globally in all parts of the EVISA website including the different databases.
In November we installed the cross-referencer for the Directory of Scientists. This feature gives access to all pages were a selected scientists occurs (e.g. News, Events etc.).

We have been encouraged during all the year by the very positive feedback from our user community that was continuously growing and has reached about 20,000 visits/month (see below).

The user statistics show a marked peak in July-August, which comes from the enhanced usage of the server before the TraceSpec 2007 workshop. Overall the number of visits of the EVISA server has been tripled during this year. We were able to welcome the 350,000 visitor in the beginning of this month!

Such a work could not be realized without the help of EVISA members, friends and partners. We are thankful for all the support that we obtained, especially from our sponsors, which was essential since funding of EVISA ended already in 2006.