This document highlights the activities and achievements of the Minnesota Center Against Violence and Abuse (MINCAVA) Electronic Clearinghouse during 2001. This report provides information about program funding, organizational structure, site usage, and changes made to the website in the past year.

MINCAVA Electronic Clearinghouse began as a component of the Violence Education Project, one of MINCAVA's first projects. The Clearinghouse has evolved into one of the most comprehensive, widely used resources for violence related material on the Internet today. The Clearinghouse provides an extensive pool of resources about various types of violence, survivor and service provider resources, educational syllabi, published research, funding sources, upcoming training events, and searchable databases of training manuals, videos and other educational resources.

While the MINCAVA Electronic Clearinghouse was originally geared toward higher education professionals, it soon became a primary source of violence related information for all types of users hungry for cutting-edge resources that were easily accessible. Now, over 1,000 users a day log on to the MINCAVA Electronic Clearinghouse. Hundreds of people use the research and training resources in order to respond to violence-related problems they encounter in their work each day. Tracking over 150,000 "hits" per month, the user pool stretches far beyond originally intended service providers and educators to encompass faith leaders, business professionals, victims/survivors, and concerned citizens form all disciplines and geographic regions around the globe.

The MINCAVA Electronic Clearinghouse has received grant support from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation as part of the National Network for Applied Research on Violence Prevention (the Network). The Network is an integral part of the Foundation's Next Generations initiative that seeks to prevent child abuse, youth violence, and adult domestic violence in demonstration communities and across the country. We are currently seeking continued support.

With future funding, MINCAVA staff could expand the site to:

The MINCAVA Electronic Clearinghouse is maintained by approximately 1.25 FTE staff, which includes one full-time Web Information Coordinator, a 15% time Administrative Assistant, and 10% time Executive Director. A virtual advisory board comprised of professionals working in various violence prevention capacities advises portions of the site. The board members offer suggestions on domestic violence, child abuse, and youth violence prevention resources and website layout as the Web Information Coordinator requests.

The Web Information Coordinator manages the daily operations of the site including weblink, event, job, and guest book submission authorization, answering technical information requests, finding and correcting dead links, coding new documents, and adding new pages and information. The Web Information Coordinator serves 100% time and supports the MINCAVA Electronic Clearinghouse's expansion of resources in the area of primary prevention, child abuse, youth violence, adult domestic violence and related areas.

The Administrative Assistant serves 15% time and is responsible for mailing correspondence and entering event information into the Event calendar database utility.

The Executive Director, Jeff Edleson, supervises the two staff working on the Electronic Clearinghouse.

MINCAVA Electronic Clearinghouse seeks to:

MINCAVA seeks to meet these goals by providing an accessible, user-friendly website that charges no fee for usage.

MINCAVA staff members produce and solicit content for the site. The site is filled with papers, reports, research findings, syllabi, curricula, presentations, training manuals, referral sources to service providers, links to other sites, and searchable databases of journals, videos, books, and other reference material.

In 2001, the MINCAVA Electronic Clearinghouse was expanded to include "Action alerts," "State legislation," "Parenting," and "Internet safety" secondary pages. These pages contain weblinks to articles, fact sheets, relevant organizations, and other resources. The "Action alerts" page posts "calls for action" that include writing campaigns and boycotts. The "State legislation" page lists the available legislative websites for each state as well as pertinent legislative updates. The "Parenting" page contains resources for parents regarding keeping their families safe. The "Internet safety" page posts information about how to clear your computer's history and cache files so no one else will find where you've been on the Internet, how to teach children about Internet safety, and more.

Other changes include arranging homepage information for better usability, adding a great number of resources to the "Terrorism" page after the terrorist bombings of September 11, 2001, adding the Family Violence Prevention Fund's End Abuse box of rotating domestic violence information in October to honor of National Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and adding a link submission utility to the website so that users can add weblinks to our database themselves.

MINCAVA Electronic Clearinghouse provides information to a broad user pool, which includes but is not limited to: victims/survivors, secondary victims, perpetrators, advocates, teachers/professors, students, attorneys, law enforcement officers, faith leaders, social service providers, activists, doctors, human resource personnel and more.

MINCAVA Electronic Clearinghouse serves a growing national and international audience. We served, on average, over 1,100 unique users each day in 2001, for a total of approximately 401,500 visitors. Users come from countries across the globe, with the great majority, 278,837 users (70%), from the United States. Other countries visiting our site in 2001 include Canada (second highest number of users - 10,870), United Kingdom, Australia, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Germany, and New Zealand. This information is based on where the domain name of the visitor is registered, and may not always be an accurate identifier of the actual geographic location of this visitor (for example, while a vast majority of .com domain names are from the United States, there is a small minority of domain names that exist outside of the United States).

Figure 1. User pool by geographic location

The following general statistic tables indicate the total monthly and yearly activity for the MINCAVA Electronic Clearinghouse in 2001.

Figure 2. Average number of user sessions per day

The table above illustrates the number of user sessions per day. This data does not inform us about the number of unique people accessing the site per day, but does provide insight about how many times per day users conduct a session on the site. A 'user' is considered a unique person accessing the site. A user commits 'hits' on the site when she visits various pages on the website. Therefore, one user may commit several hits during her user session.

It is interesting to note that the PDF article "Nation's victim assistance organizations issue trauma recovery tips to Americans" posted to the site on September 14, 2001 received 33 downloads in September and October alone.

During 2001, the MINCAVA Electronic Clearinghouse received approximately 965 information requests through the website's email account. The tables below show the number of information requests received per month and the type of requests received.

Figure 3. Number of information requests per month

Figure 4. Type of request received

MINCAVA identified the type of request received as:

Between January 1, 2001 and December 31, 2001, the greatest number of emails was not relevant to our topic (362 emails - 37%). 160 emails were violence related but did not fall under any other category, 140 emails were requests for link submission (an increase from last year due to the addition of a link submission utility to the website), 137 were site related, 58 emails came from Middle Eastern women's organizations and other concerned citizens after the terrorist attacks of 9/11/2001, 24 were from people looking for crisis resources or wanting to share their survival story, and 9 emails were from people looking for resources for their loved ones.

The MINCAVA Electronic Clearinghouse receives feedback from site users in a variety of ways.

The following is a sampling of comments users have written in the guest book during 2001:

The MINCAVA Electronic Clearinghouse has experienced growth and activity over the past year. This growth can be seen in the site's usage, development, and technical assistance requests.

The Electronic Clearinghouse averaged 1,100 users per day. This is an increase of 69% from last year. During 2001, approximately 600 new links to articles and webpages were added to the content database, bringing our resource links to 2800. Four secondary pages were added to the list of 54 violence related topics on our website. The number of event submissions also increased.

The Electronic Clearinghouse has continued to receive increasing numbers of emails. There was an increase in letters related to violence and violence prevention, as well as increased requests for link submission. However, the majority of emails were not related to our work or the website.

The Electronic Clearinghouse has received positive feedback about our resources from others in the field and was said to be a valuable resource in others' violence prevention efforts.

Web usage statistics were calculated using the software program Web Trends [http://www.webtrends.com/default.htm].

MINCAVA Electronic Clearinghouse: a portfolio of information about one of the most widely used websites for violence-related resources on the internet today [http://www.mincava.umn.edu/center/portfoli.html]

Executive Summary: Violence Against Women Online Resources Site Usage Statistics October 1, 2000 - September 30, 2001

Survey for user feedback can be found at http://www.mincava.umn.edu/submit/survey.shtml.