Contents

• Introduction
• Basic Recommendations
  • Technical Considerations [Important]
  • Information to Include
  • Arrangement of the Information
• Additional Recommendations
• Final Remarks

The Editor is occasionally asked by scholarly societies for advice on setting up a web site. He presents this set of recommendations for the benefit of scholarly societies who are interested in setting up a new web site, as well as those who are interested in improving the ones they already have.

Here are a couple of possibilities:

• Your society owns its own computer
  This is the ideal situation, since it minimizes changes to the URL.
  • Register a domain name with the appropriate domain name registrar. For the .org, .com and .net domains (which are the most appropriate ones for societies) this is the InterNIC: http://www.internic.net/ The Domain Name Service is the internet standard protocol used to translate host names to IP addresses.
  • Your domain name will then have the form xyz.org or xyz.com, where xyz is some reasonable abbreviation of the society's name
  • Name the top-level page of your web site: index.html
  • Then you should follow standard conventions and assign the web site the URL: http://www.xyz.org/ OR http://www.xyz.com/
  • If you follow the above instructions, you will be unlikely to want to change the URL in the near future.

• Your society doesn't have a computer of its own
  Many societies do not yet own their own computers. The following advice is intended for them:
  
  • Identify some member of your society who has access to a computer with Internet connectivity OR approach some commercial Internet Service Provider.
  • Arrange to have some member or commercial agency to write the HTML code for your site, and have the code installed at that site.
  • If at all possible,
    • register a domain name with the appropriate domain name registrar. For the .org and .com domains this is the InterNIC: http://www.internic.net/ The Domain Name Service is the internet standard protocol used to translate host names to IP addresses.
    • Once you have a registered domain name (xyz.org) you can assign a name in that domain (www.xyz.org) to the the computer that is hosting your web site.
    • For example, if your pages were hosted on the machine www.isp.net, you could assign the address for that machine to the name www.xyz.org. A domain name merely maps a name to an address and there is no problem with having several names for one computer/address.
    • In most cases, your Internet Service Provider or the people who are providing the machine hosting your web pages will be familiar with the domain registration process and will be able to help you get registered.
    • Then, if you later change your Internet Service Provider, you do NOT need to change the URL: you simply change the associated IP address so that it corresponds to your new address.
  • If at a later date, you absolutely MUST change the URL, but you have not taken the precautions listed in the previous point, PLEASE leave a pointer from the old URL to the new one. This is a courtesy to other users of the Internet.

• Full Name of the Society
• Preferred Initialism/Abbreviation for the Society Name
• Alternative Official Name(s) in Other Languages
  For example, in Canada, scholarly societies often have an official name in each of English and French; in Switzerland, they often have an official name in each of French, German, and Italian.
• Preferred Initialism/Abbreviation for the Alternative names
• Statement of Scope/Mission/Purpose of the Society
  It is important to let prospective members know why the society exists. If the subject area of interest to your society does not fall completely within one of the traditional disciplines (e.g. it is interdisciplinary), then it is useful to indicate the various traditional disciplines with which its interests overlap.
• History of the Society
  Many readers will be interested in learning about the origins of the society. In any case, the Scholarly Societies Project requires the founding year for our chronology file; if you don't provide it at your web site, we have to go to extra effort to find it, which delays the inclusion of your web site in the Project.
• Membership Information
  Some visitors will want to know if they qualify for membership, and, if so, how to apply for membership
• Publications of the Society
  Many societies publish books, newsletters, magazines, journals, standards, or specifications. It is in a society's best interests to provide readers with an online catalogue of its publications.
• Services to Members
  Prospective members will want to know what they will gain by becoming members of the society. Typical services include: free or reduced-rate subscriptions to society journals, reduced costs for books published by the society, reduced-rate registration fees for society conferences and meetings, and access to employment placement services.
• Calendar of Meetings/Conferences Sponsored by the Society
  Prospective members will be interested in the nature, scope and frequency of meetings sponsored by the society.
• Listing of Affiliated or Member Societies (if there are any)
  If your society is either a federation of societies or has some affiliated societies, it is important to let readers know which societies these are. You should list these societies, and provide links to web sites for any societies that have them. For example, see some of the listings of affiliated or member societies that the Scholarly Societies Projects knows of.
• Email Contact Addresses for the webmaster of the site, and possibly some members of the executive of the society as well. These addresses are usually provided using a mailto facility, or a comment/suggestion form facility, so that the user can send email without having to leave the web browser.
• Date of Last Modification or Review
  It is useful to let your readers have some idea of the currency of the information in your site. You can provide either one date for the entire site, or a date for each page in the site.

• Central Access to Information
  • The user should be able to go directly from a top-level page to all major categories of information about the society.
  • For example, the user should not have to go to a page on publications of the society in order to find membership information (we have seen sites where a page about the society journal was the top-level page!): membership information should be found either on the top-level page or via a link on that page.

• Summarization of Categories
  The top-level page should either:
  • contain only a relatively small collection of links to other pages of information for all the major categories of information included (with some additional text, as required), OR
  • begin with a Table of Contents (like the page you are now reading) with internal links to other parts of the document (or external links to other pages) that deal with the major topics of information.

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  Additional Recommendations

  If your society has sufficient resources, it may want to consider including some of the information services listed below:
  • Calendar of Meetings/Conferences of Possible Interest to Members
    Some societies publish announcement lists (or calendars) of events of interest to their membership (regardless of who sponsors the events). For example, see the collection of announcement lists that the Scholarly Societies Project knows of. This naturally requires a time commitment that not all societies are able to make.
  • Links to Similar Society Web Sites
  • Links to Other Sites in the Same Subject Area
    A number of society web sites maintain a list of pointers to valuable sites in the areas of interest to their members.
  • Employment Opportunities in the Field
    An increasing number of societies are publishing announcements of jobs that are available in areas of interest to their membership.

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  Final Remarks

  The most important question that you should be asking yourself is:

  How can we make our web site as useful to our current members, and as attractive to potential members, as possible?

  Having an Internet presence offers you many opportunities that you didn't have before. It's up to you to use that presence effectively. Good Luck!

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  Jim Parrott
  The Editor
  Scholarly Societies Project
  Sending Email to the Scholarly Societies Project