Internet Scout celebrates 10 years on web, eyes new project launch

Internet Scout celebrates 10 years on web, eyes new project launch

Madison, Wis. – From less than 1 million to 600 billion pages-that’s one measure of the World Wide Web’s growth in the past 10 years.
From the beginning, the Internet Scout Project has been on the job, providing better tools for finding, filtering and presenting online information. Internet Scout is currently celebrating its first decade on the Web and also looking forward to a future of continuing exploration and service, including a new, four-year development program targeting community and technical colleges.
Located at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Scout Project is focused on creating practical Web-based information and software solutions for educators, librarians, and researchers. The Scout Report, published every Friday since 1994, reaches more than 250,000 readers worldwide via email and the Web. In recent years, Scout has expanded beyond the Scout Report and has ventured into portal projects and open-source software development that are in use by a variety of not-for-profit organizations.
Scout is a major partner in the National Science Foundation’s National Science Digital Library (NSDL) initiative, which aims to be the largest science, technology, engineering and math digital library ever created.
A special new commemorative section of the Scout Web site – – features user experiences with the Scout reports, archives and open-source software, and highlights the evolution of Scout. The Scout team is currently working on its newest project, a $2.6 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to improve access to NSDL. This new project, the Applied Mathematics and Science Education Repository (AMSER), is designed to help meet the resource and service needs of community and technical colleges and forge a link between these communities and the larger NSDL.
“Being part of the birth and growth of the Internet over the last ten years has been an amazing experience for us here at Scout, and with AMSER and our other new projects we’re very much looking forward to being an integral part of the continued evolution and maturation of the Internet over the next ten years,” says Scout Co-Director Edward Almasy.
For more information about the Internet Scout Project – where it has been and where it’s headed – visit http://scout.wisc.edu/.

Rachael Bower can be reached at bower@scout.wisc.edu