Oriental Institute Website Traffic in 2008

[And see now a comparable list for 2009 - added 3 January 2009]

In 2008 826,805 unique visitors came to the Oriental Institute website 1,149,023 times, looking at 3,982,345 pages (averaging 3.46 pages per visit). 68.9 % of these visitors stayed 30 seconds or less before leaving, but 14.7 % stayed longer than 5 minutes.

Robots, worms and other such creatures looked at another 7,839,713 pages.

The twenty five most frequently viewed pages on the Oriental Institute Website are:

1. The Oriental Institute Home Page 463306 visits


2. The Museum Education Mummy Game 246444 visits


3. The Museum Education Home Page 121614 visits


4. The Museum Home Page 69754 visits


5. NIPPUR - SACRED CITY OF ENLIL, SUPREME GOD OF SUMER AND AKKAD. Figure. 1 Map of ancient Mesopotamia. 67300 visits


6. The Museum Education Kids' Corner 52337 visits


7. Highlights from the Collection: Mesopotamia 42238 visits
   


8. Oriental Institute Map Series - Site Maps 41935 visits
   


9. Death in Ancient Egypt 40755 visits
   


10. Highlights from the Collections 36625 visits
    


11. Research at the Oriental Institute 35544 visits
    


12. Persepolis and Ancient Iran 31071 visits
    


13. The Oriental Institute Museum Hours 28060 visits
    


14. Museum Galleries 23270 visits
    


15. The Edgar and Deborah Jannotta Mesopotamian Gallery 22438 visits
    


16. Lost Treasures from Iraq 21469 visits
    


17. Abzu 21284 visits
    


18. The Giza Plateau Mapping Project (GPMP) 21268 visits
    


19. The Oriental Institute Museum: The East Wing Galleries 21158 visits
    


20. Oriental Institute Events 20465 visits
    


21. Egypt and the Ancient Near East: Web Resources for Young People and Teachers 19943 visits
    


22. Museum Education Teacher Resource Center. Mesopotamia: Science & Inventions 18048 visits
    


23. The Oriental Institute Home Page 17977 visits
    


24. Catalog of Publications 17857 visits
    


25. Museum Gallery Tours & Program 17166 visits

The top twenty-five points of entry to the Oriental Institute website are:

1. The Oriental Institute Home Page
   


2. The Museum Education Mummy Game
   


3. NIPPUR - SACRED CITY OF ENLIL, SUPREME GOD OF SUMER AND AKKAD. Figure. 1 Map of ancient Mesopotamia.
   


4. Death in Ancient Egypt
   


5. The Museum Education Kids' Corner
   


6. Oriental Institute Map Series - Site Maps
   


7. Highlights from the Collection: Mesopotamia
   


8. The Museum Home Page
   


9. Persepolis and Ancient Iran
   


10. Highlights from the Collections
    


11. Egypt and the Ancient Near East: Web Resources for Young People and Teachers
    


12. The Giza Plateau Mapping Project (GPMP)
    


13. Lost Treasures from Iraq
    


14. The Oriental Institute Home Page
    


15. Abzu
    


16. Constructing The Giza Plateau Computer Model (1990-1995)
    


17. Museum Education Teacher Resource Center. Mesopotamia: Science & Inventions
    


18. NUBIA - "Its glory and its people" 1987 EXHIBITION: BROCHURE, FEBRUARY 1 thru 28, 1987
    


19. WHO WAS WHO AMONG THE ROYAL MUMMIES
    


20. Museum Education Teacher Resource Center. Mesopotamia: Law & Government
    


21. Museum Education Teacher Resource Center. Mesopotamia: Architecture
    


22. Oriental Institute Map Series
    


23. Museum Education Teacher Resource Center. Mesopotamia: Role of Women
    


24. Nippur - Sacred City Of Enlil: SUPREME GOD OF SUMER AND AKKAD
    


25. Highlights from the Collection: Egypt
    

These lists show some some interesting patterns which requires some preliminary comments:

Various pages in the complex developed by the Museum Education department are heavily represented in the top 25 entry pages (nos. 2, 5, 17, 20, 21, and 23).

In each list, variants of the OI home page appear twice, once with and once without the final "/".

Both lists include three pages of specific interest:

• Abzu is a link to a redirector, sending users (after a short explanation) to the current site of Abzu at the ETANA project at Vanderbilt University. Though Abzu has been served from Vanderbilt for several years it still received more than twenty thousand hits on the OI website in 2008.
  


• The Museum Education Mummy Game is the second most popular page (with nearly a quarter million viewers in 2008) and the second most frequent point of entry to the OI website. It includes no links back to either its source in the Museum Education site, or more generally to the OI home page.
  


• Death in Ancient Egypt, and
  


• Egypt and the Ancient Near East: Web Resources for Young People and Teachers, together representing more than sixty thousand annual visits to the Oriental Institute web presence, have never been converted to the new format, and have no links to them from elsewhere on the OI web.
  


• WHO WAS WHO AMONG THE ROYAL MUMMIES, an article by Edward Wente appearing originally in the Oriental Institute News & Notes No. 144, Winter 1995, and
  


• NUBIA - "Its glory and its people" 1987 EXHIBITION: BROCHURE, FEBRUARY 1 thru 28, 1987, a brochure by Bruce B. Williams published in conjunction with the exhibition presented by: THE ORIENTAL INSTITUTE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO and the OAK WOODS CEMETERY ASSOCIATION In the Tower of Memories, Oak Woods Cemetery, Chicago, 1987, remain consistently among the important points of entry to the Oriental Institute web presence years after the were originally reformatted for the web.
  

I'll add more comments as they occur to me.


Finally, a list of the twenty-five most frequently downloaded digital versions (pdf) of formal publications of the Oriental Institute for 2008. Note that some of these are fairly recent, but others are old standards.

1. Oriental Institute 2002-2003 Annual Report, downloaded 4853 times.
   


2. OIS 4. Religion and Power: Divine Kingship in the Ancient World and Beyond, Nicole Brisch, ed., downloaded 3152 times.
   


3. OIS 3.Performing Death: Social Analyses of Funerary Traditions in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean, Nicola Laneri, editor, with contributions by Nicola Laneri, Ellen F. Morris, Glenn M. Schwartz, Robert Chapman, Massimo Cultraro, Meredith S. Chesson, Alessandro Naso, Adam T. Smith, Dina Katz, Seth Richardson, Susan Pollock, Ian Rutherford, John Pollini, John Robb, and James A. Brown, downloaded 2924 times.
   


4. The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (CAD), Volume 14, R, 1999, downloaded 2806 times.


5. The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (CAD), Volume 12, P, 2005, downloaded 2781 times.


6. The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (CAD), Volume 1, A, part 1, 1964, downloaded 2679 times.


7. The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (CAD), Volume 18, T, 2006, downloaded 2613 times.


8. SAOC 62. Proceedings of the 51st Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Held at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, July 18–22, 2005, Robert D. Biggs, Jennie Myers, and Martha T. Roth, eds., downloaded 2416 times.
   


9. OIS 2, Margins of Writing, Origins of Cultures, Seth L. Sanders, editor, with contributions by Seth L. Sanders, John Kelly, Gonzalo Rubio, Jacco Dieleman, Jerrold Cooper, Christopher Woods, Annick Payne, William Schniedewind, Michael Silverstein-, Piotr Michalowski, Paul-Alain Beaulieu, Theo van den Hout, Paul Zimansky, Sheldon Pollock, and Peter Machinist. (second printing), downloaded 2198 times.
   


10. SAOC 61. Sacred Space and Sacred Function in Ancient Thebes, Peter F. Dorman and Betsy M. Bryan, editors, downloaded 2192 times.
    


11. The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (CAD), Volume 19, T [Tet], 2006, downloaded 2163 times.


12. MAD 2. Old Akkadian Writing and Grammar, I. J. Gelb, 1952, downloaded 1993 times.
    


13. AS 27. Studies Presented to Robert D. Biggs, June 4, 2004 From the Workshop of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, Volume 2, Martha T. Roth, Walter Farber, Matthew W. Stolper and Paula von Bechtolsheim, eds., 2007, downloaded 1886 times.
    


14. The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (CAD), Volume 10, M, part 1, 1977, downloaded 1621 times.


15. The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (CAD), Volume 1, A, part 2, 1968, downloaded 1504 times.


16. The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (CAD), Volume 10, M, part 2, 1977, downloaded 1495 times.


17. OIMP 28. Catastrophe! The Looting and Destruction of Iraq’s Past, edited by Geoff Emberling and Katharyn Hanson, 2008, downloaded 1495 times.
    


18. OIS 2, Margins of Writing, Origins of Cultures, Seth L. Sanders, editor, with contributions by Seth L. Sanders, John Kelly, Gonzalo Rubio, Jacco Dieleman, Jerrold Cooper, Christopher Woods, Annick Payne, William Schniedewind, Michael Silverstein-, Piotr Michalowski, Paul-Alain Beaulieu, Theo van den Hout, Paul Zimansky, Sheldon Pollock, and Peter Machinist. (first printing), downloaded 1491 times.
    


19. The Hittite Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (CHD), P, fascicle 3 (pattar to putkiya-), 1997, downloaded 1481 times,


20. The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (CAD), Volume 11, N, part 1, 1980, downloaded 1370 times.


21. The Demotic Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, Janet H. Johnson, editor: Prologue, downloaded 1362 times.
    


22. The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (CAD), Volume 9, L, 1973, downloaded 1306 times.


23. The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (CAD), Volume 2, B, 1965, downloaded 1306 times.


24. OIP 132. The Egyptian Coffin Texts, Volume 8. Middle Kingdom Copies of Pyramid Texts, James P. Allen, 2006, downloaded 1296 times.
    


25. OIMP 25. Embroidering Identities: A Century of Palestinian Clothing.
    By Iman Saca in collaboration with Maha Saca, 2006, downloaded 1255 times.
    

OIS 2 in its two printings is the 9th and 18th most popular digital publication of the OI during 2008 - collectively it would be No. 2, downloaded 3689 times.


The Oriental Institute has always has always been open about the traffic on its website. Historical statistics are accessible here. Current statistics are accessible here.