A site on the World Wide Web (WWW) has been The American's new face to the world since spring 1995, when we began operating a server computer connected to the Internet.
In addition to the Web site (The American's new home page is shown at right), the computer has provided us with a complex system to manage E-mail for the Central Office and mailing lists for groups of members including the entire membership, the Executive Council, and others.
The World Wide Web site (address apsa.org) is actually our entry into the new, turbulent arena of online publishing. Millions of computer users all over the world now have almost instant access to our information, which we make available simply by putting it on our server computer. However, in addition to supplying information to passive readers, we have tried to make our site interactive in order to experiment with the advantages of this new medium. We have also tried to make use of some graphics in a tasteful manner.
Almost all of our site has been built with volunteer labor, so we were able to avoid the enormous costs associated with establishing similar sites by other organizations—estimated to run from $100,000 to over a million dollars. That's why we have tried to arrange for various components of The American to take responsibility for corresponding sections of the site. Thus subsections on the site are operated by TAP, JAPA, the Fellowship Program, Public Information, and the Central Office.
During our first eleven months of operation we have logged about 24,500 visits to our site (a visit is defined as any number of accesses to our site on a given day from a single address. This is equal to 217,000 hits.) Of course, many of these visits are just people aimlessly surfing the Web who happen to find our needle in the enormous haystack of Web sites. However, many are people with a serious interest in psychoanalysis. We have had almost eight thousand repeat visits, i.e., accesses from a previously recorded address on a subsequent day. Over 3,500 of our visitors have downloaded the full text of “About Psychoanalysis.” By April 1996 the number of individuals accessing our site was exceeding a hundred a day. In its first two months of operation, the literature search facility was accessed by over 1,400 individuals. Even at this relatively early stage there are over ten thousand Web pages all over the Internet with references to psychoanalysis. Since every one of these pages has a unique address, it is possible to create links that provide access to any other site. This is the basis of the hypertext model for information on all computers with Internet access to be linked in a web of relationships. So far the potential of this enormous knowledge base of mankind
has been realized in only the most superficial sense. How this potential will evolve for psychoanalysis is still unclear.
Another feature of the Internet server computer is the facility to set up special mailing lists for the benefit of our organization and others. Functionally, a mailing list is simply an address to which an E-mail message is sent, then the message is mailed automatically by the computer to a predefined list of recipients, which could number a few to thousands of people. Discussion groups, bulletin boards (BBS), and support networks are examples of such lists.
The major lists on our server at present are the members list, the psychoanalytic BBS, and the council list. The members list, members@apsa.org, is a list of all the E-mail addresses of every member in the organization. This list facilitates discussion among members of The American, particularly with regard to organization business and professional issues. We discourage the use of this list to post notices. Only recipients of the list may send messages out to the entire list so that junk mail is kept to a minimum.
The psychoanalytic BBS is the present incarnation of the Psychoanalytic Virtual Bulletin Board operated by Robert Galatzer-Levy. This list is open to all psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic candidates from any institute.
Finally, the Council list is a discussion list for members of the Executive Council, which is now able to conduct significant discussions between the twice-yearly meetings. This list has already shown its value in promoting a lively discussion of issues that arose in anticipation of the annual meeting in May 1996. At present more than 60 percent of all councilors are participant-subscribers to the Council list discussions.