Dennis Silverman
spinning the website
Our department now has a website to show that we are at the forefront of modern technology and communications. Actually it was formally set up to aid in recruiting graduate students and undergraduates. As it grew, it was expanded to many other uses. Before I go on too long, you may be itching to try it out, which will be more exciting than reading about it. The sites' URL is: http://www.ps.uci.edu/physics/. Its core uses are to describe the programs we have here for undergraduates and for graduate students, and the research engaged in by the faculty and students. Besides standard things like the catalog, it describes our undergraduate research programs and the activities of the student physics society. The faculty research is described under their fields and experiments, and then each faculty has an individual page description from our graduate brochure.Among its supplemental uses are a site to record and publicize honors and awards received by the faculty and by the students. If you received a Ph. D. here, you are listed on the web. It also has our electronic phone directory, maps of how to get to our building, easy library access, a link to pictures on the web from our observatory, and recent pictures of the faculty.
The website has been getting about 6,000 pages of access a month, including accesses from many educational sites, government labs, and sites at foreign countries. We are listed on about 30 lists of physics and astronomy departments or research sites. With the expansion of online services and ready availability of internet browsing software just now occuring, we expect the usefullness of this endeavor to grow.