Aloha ...,

If you are among the many who have forwarded information on the Public Anthropology Journal Archive project to colleagues and students, THANK YOU. You have helped make the archive at www.publicanthropology.org a well used tool of anthropological research. (It presently receives between 45,000 and 60,000 hits per month.)

BUT, THERE IS A PROBLEM. Most of the website's visitors appear to be anthropologically inclined individuals from Canada and the United States. Would you be kind enough to FORWARD this e-mail to colleagues in other countries as well as to colleagues in other departments at your (and other) universities. Sending it on to your school library and/or individuals you know in the media would be great as well.

It is one thing to have a valued resource that WE know about. But the Public Anthropology Archive should also prove valuable to anthropologists in OTHER COUNTRIES as well as to a range of people OUTSIDE the discipline. Your help, in achieving this, would be appreciated. Who knows what new doors the archive will open for the discipline?

As stated in my earlier letter, you can use the archive to search for ANY AUTHOR, NAME, SUBJECT, OR CULTURAL GROUP WRITTEN ABOUT IN THE AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST FROM 1888 THROUGH 2000 and can get a summary of what was said by whom. (To try it out, simply click on publicanthropology.org/Archive/AAListByYears.htm ). Besides finding a particular author, name, subject, or cultural group, individuals can take a particular year - say 1890 - and see what topics were covered in what ways focusing on which cultural groups. Better yet, people can compare several years - say 1890, 1920, 1950, 1970, and 2000 - to see to what degree and in what ways anthropology has developed over that past 110 years: How have the questions and topics changed? In what ways has there been progress? (You can even see how you and your colleagues’ articles are summarized in the American Anthropologist.)

The project, involving more than 70 schools from Canada and the United States, presents what might be termed a "bifocal" view of the material. "Bifocal" refers to the fact that there are two summaries by two different students at two different schools for each article and obituary. The goal is to avoid the biases implicit in single-authored reviews so common today.

We have completed roughly 75% of the 8,000 summaries involved in the AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST portion of the project and expect to complete the rest this fall. If you or colleagues are interested in HAVING ONE OF YOUR CLASSES PARTICIPATE IN THE PROJECT FOR CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY or HUMAN ORGANIZATION this coming spring - I would stress it works best when done as a set of class assignments - all you have to do send me an e-mail at borofsky@hpu.edu or you can click on: http://www.publicanthropology.org/Archive/HowToParticipate.htm to find out more about the project.

THANK YOU for your help.

Regards,

Rob Borofsky