Arrangement of the Archive and the new website of the Accademia della Crusca

• Arrangement of the Archive

Read more in the section Heritage development

• Development of the new Accademia website

By renewing its website (first launched in 1996), the Accademia has presented as wide information as possible on its historical heritage, its structures and activities. But it also aimed at a more general task, providing special services, materials and building up “meeting points” between users: it has offered opportunities for increasing users’ interest in Italian and, in this way, even their basic "linguistic culture".
The second version of the website was inaugurated in September 2002, with a presentation that raised a wide interest in Italy and abroad.
For ten years, the 2002 version of the website has collected, sorted out and made accessible a large amount of qualified information about linguistic field. The web pages were not only a virtual calling card of the Accademia, but also a real portal of Italian language, organized in eight main sections that focused on the main points of its past history and current activities: The Accademia, History, Activities, Publications, News, Virtual Library, Lingua in rete, Stravizzi.
The content was then divided in many subsections, in which information was accessible both through quick search and through many specific search engines. Such a double possibility fostered the interaction with a diversified audience , therefore not just with experts, but with anyone interested in Italian.
Many are the multimedia projects carried out by the Accademia, available for users in the Virtual Library section: fundamental databases about the main tools for the language study and analysis, especially grammars and old and modern dictionaries. This double online access has been very functional also for searching within the section Lingua in rete, probably the most dynamic of the entire site because it was designed and created in order to develop a continuous interaction with users by sending linguistic queries and information about new words, and especially consulting the many answers to doubts and the articles about new words, collected in a marked up database.
From October 2002 to November 2011, the website has reached roughly 720.000 visits with more than 200 million of pages visited. The monthly average of 2011 has been of roughly 160.000 visits (5.000 every day) with more than 4 million pages. Taking into account the volume of search traffic and the rapid changes of web communication and multimedia world, in 2011 the Accademia started setting up and creating a new version of its website that will be launched for the fourth centenary of the publication of the first edition of the Vocabolario.