Melbourne, March 8, 2007, Peter Friedlander. This website has been up and running now for about two and a half years (14th October 2004-6th March 2007). There have been nearly three quarters of a million hits on the site of which over 643,000 were views of the materials in the DCD database, i.e. pages from the documents, and around 77,229 views of the html pages that introduce and contextualise the documents, an average of around 800 page views per day.[1] Some of the major points in what we have achieved are:

• Identified and sourced 20 rare seminal documents related to the research on South Asia.
• Facilitated co-operation between La Trobe University, Curtin University, University of New England the University of Sydney to digitise these documents.
• Digitized 20 major 19th century documents related to India published between 1808 and 1901.
• Developed and implemented software to make these documents available as a publically accessible Internet resource for researchers
• Created a full text search capability for all 8531 pages in the database.
• During the first year of the availability of this website [10th Oct 2004- to 11th October 2005] there were approx 100,000 hits on the site, (an average of about 260 hits on the site a day)
• The DCD project also made possible the development and delivery of two further searchable internet research resources: a major database (20,000+ pages) of the Buddhist Pali Canon ( http://www.chaf.lib.latrobe.edu.au/dcd/pali.htm) and an online searchable Hindi dictionary ( http://www.chaf.lib.latrobe.edu.au/dcd/vocab.php ).
• Awarded 5 start status by WWW monitor: (See:  http://asia-www-monitor.blogspot.com/2004/09/digital-colonial-documents-india.html )
• Now referenced as a source in over 350 websites (see: this google search)

What next?
The funding for the project has now run out, so we are unlikely to be able to add any more major documents to it. The database will however continue to be hosted here at La Trobe into the forseeable future and it is possible that some further small documents may be added to it.

1 A technical note on the usage figures. The figures are a little rough and ready due to three reasons. First, the data for November 2005 cannot be located, second, the combination of using HTML, PHP and MySQL makes the server report a little hard to summarise, third, a small number of the hits mentioned actually relate to files in the Chinese Heritage of Australian Federation project which also runs on this server, but I managed to filter out most of these, and their total number does not seem to be likely to be more than the number of hits which I lost data on due to the November 2005 data being lost during the change over from one server to another.

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