WWW.WAS.ORG • WORLD AQUACULTURE • MARCH 2015 7 extraordinary way in 1994 with the beginning of commercial and public access to the “World Wide Web” and the introduction of the Aquaculture Network Information Center (AquaNIC) website. LaDon Swann was the chief architect responsible for establishing AquaNIC as a dedicated aquaculture website – the first in the U.S. – with the goal of serving as the information gateway to the world’s electronic resources on aquaculture. Swann, at that time an extension specialist at Purdue University and currently Director of the Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant Consortium, collaborated with Mark Einstein, an Internet Technology specialist with the Department of Animal Sciences at Purdue University, to develop and manage AquaNIC. Initial funding was provided by the USDA Cooperative State Research Education and Extension Service (now known as the National Institute for Food and Agriculture) and the Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant Program. The North Central Regional Aquaculture Center, the Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant Consortium, the Alabama Cooperative Extension System, and the National Sea Grant program also provided sustaining support. With a compilation of more than 8,000 state, national, and international aquaculture publications, newsletters, videos and other media, and 800 links to other domestic and international websites, AquaNIC grew in domestic and international popularity to become a premier aquaculture information resource, drawing more than one million visitors annually from the United States and more than 90 countries. Development of searchable job and resume databases was a new and innovative technical achievement at that time, and “/Jobs” was the most accessed sub-directory on the website, accounting for 39 percent of visitor traffic. Other features included online submission forms for jobs and resumes and a series of links to other employment and career-related information. The WAS worked cooperatively with AquaNIC to manage the jobs section by adding and updating job listings and other content, identifying new links to other job and career websites, and assisting students, industry members, and employers with their use of the job and resume databases throughout the year. As the Society continued to increase and diversify its international membership and support new professional development initiatives for students, an employment service booth with current jobs, resumes, interview opportunities, and online website access became a regular part of World Aquaculture and U.S. Aquaculture Society annual meetings. Past, Present, and Future What started as a simple solution to fill a need for job information at annual U.S. aquaculture meetings continued to grow, adapt, and develop into a web-based international resource for the year-round exchange of employment information. Since the advent of online listings, the employment service has posted more than 18,700 jobs and 13,000 resumes. In 2011, the cumulative effect of budget reductions and lack of funding support, Einstein’s retirement and the launch of the U.S. Land Grant University System’s comprehensive eXtension website (www.extension.org) contributed to discontinuation of operation of the Aquaculture Network Information Center after 17 years of service. Most of the technical publications, media, and other links on AquaNIC were transferred to eXtension, but finding a new home for the continuation of the job and resume databases proved to be more problematic due to the unique nature of the AquaNIC-WAS collaboration. Fortunately, with the assistance of WAS Webmaster George McKee and Mark Einstein working out the technical details, the employment files were successfully integrated with the WAS website in January 2012. Website data compiled over the 30-month period (1 January 2012 to 1 July 2014) since the transfer of employment service files from AquaNIC to the WAS server illustrate current usage patterns. The combined job, resume and link databases received an average of 50,760 unique visitors annually from all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and 174 countries. New (36 percent) and returning (64 percent) visitors average 161,172 visitor sessions and 382,164 page views per year with international visitors accounting for 55 percent of the overall traffic volume. Using Google Analytics to assess international and U.S. visitor traffic linking to the WAS employment pages via the Delaware Aquaculture Resource Center (darc.cms.udel.edu/wases) during that same time period provides additional insight on the top ten most active countries and states, and their relative proportion of new users and new visitor sessions. In the early years of industry development and the AquaNIC website, the majority of visitors (63 Country Sessions Percent Percent of New users Percent of total new sessions of total United States 46,601 45.0 31.8 14,814 40.3 Florida 4,761 10.2 38.7 1,845 12.5 North Carolina 3,489 7.5 20.7 724 4.9 Maryland 2,946 6.3 16.2 477 3.2 Texas 2,876 6.2 25.7 739 5.0 California 2,589 5.6 41.8 1,082 7.3 Virginia 1,917 4.1 27.1 520 3.5 Washington 1,782 3.8 23.9 425 2.9 New York 1,633 3.5 35.8 584 3.9 Kentucky 1,504 3.2 16.5 248 1.7 Alabama 1,503 3.2 30.6 460 3.1 (CONTINUED ON PAGE 8)
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