2008Q3 Reports: Website

			     ACL Web Site
			      Ali Hakim

	(with assistance from Dragomir Radev and Peter Turney)

The ACL Anthology was moved to the aclweb.org server and off the upenn.edu
server.  Min-Yen Kan is responsible for maintaining the anthology in its new
location.

An Exec Wiki was created at
http://aclweb.org/execwiki/index.php5?title=Main_Page
Only members of the ACL executive committee are eligible to have accounts on
the exec wiki.  The webmaster, Ali Hakim is responsible for creating accounts
as required.

An archive of ACL Committee resolutions has been created at
http://aclweb.org/policies/resolutions.html
Resolutions are posted once they have been approved.

The ACL Wiki is also used for collaborating editing of the conference
handbook and other documents. This illustrates another class of possible uses
for the ACL Wiki: ACL administrative tasks and collaborative tasks.

These positive impact of these changes can be seen in the use statistics of
the site.  The number of unique visits to the site continues to rise.  In
2006, there were 421,217 unique visits.  In the 2007, it had increased to
1,262,133 an increase of 60%.  To date, there have been 819,657 unique visits
in 2008.

The average number of pages per visit is also increasing.  It was 1.8 in
2006, 2.5 in 2007, and 3.8 so far in 2008.  Across all three years, the two
most popular pages of the site are the homepages for the ACL wiki and the ACL
homepage itself.

Windows is the predominant operating system of visitors, accounting for 80%
of visitors in 2006, 74% in 2007 and 86% in 2008.  Linux is second and
Macintosh is third.






After last year's reorganization, the structure of the archive has  
remained constant over the last year.  The archive has been updated  
with new documents (including 2007's reports).
 
Given that the reports are archived now annually, I have worked with  
the current first-year executive committee member (Hwee Tou Ng) to  
make sure that the links to the previous year's reports in the report  
collection website point to the archive, rather than the previous  
committee member's page.  Setting the report page up with relative  
(rather than absolute) links makes the archiving easier, so it might  
be nice to put a note in the first-year's exec duties to consult with  
the archivist on the design of the report collection page.
 
On the "to do" list in the next year is restructuring the executive  
committee private area.
 
There has been some interest by a senior member of the community to  
find and scan old documents pertaining to the ACL.  Many of these are  
things like the "Finite String" (some of which are on microfiche) so  
this has been brought to the attention of the ACL anthologist.
 
Given that there is now several repositories of information of  
different types (ACL Anthology, ACL Archive, ACL Video Archive, other  
live ACL documents (e.g. Policies and Proceedures)), it might be time  
to consider having someone coordinate the activities and interlinking  
of this information.  I've gotten a few requests now to update things  
which are not under my control (e.g., better links from the ACL  
policies document into the archive, or things that belong more  
properly in the anthology).   Forwarding these requests is not  
problematic, but it suggests that the users of this information are  
not clear on the boundaries and it might be time to clarify (or even  
rethink) the roles of these areas and how they should relate to each  
other.