European Union MAST Programme of DGXII funded the establishment of the EU-SEASED database in 1998.  The metadata providers comprised a consortium of European geological surveys and marine research institutes, who also took a role of gathering seafloor sample metadata from European university marine science departments and marine stations.  The EU-SEASED website was initially established in January 1999, and the first data was available for text-based searching in July 1999.  In July 2000, a graphical map-based search option was introduced, allowing users to define areas of interest on a world map with the resulting display of bottom sample stations within the area of interest and associated discovery metadata.

The EU-SEASED database now contains information on over 185,000 seafloor sample stations and has completed its first full year of operation.  So it is timely to examine the use of the database at this time and assess its success in promoting greater access to the European seafloor sample archive. Access statistics for the website against time are pre-
sented below.

By the end of the year 2000, after 18 months of operation, the EU-SEASED website was receiving between 40,000 and 60,000 'hits' a month, approximately a ten-fold increase since September 1999 (Figs. 1 and 2).  The number of clients accessing the website has also steadily increased since the establishment of the website (Fig. 1).  The public launch of the website at the EurOCEAN 2000 Conference in Hamburg, Germany, in August 2000, and the resulting publicity seems to have provided a major impetus in users accessing the database (Figs. 2 and 3).  However, citations of the number of 'hits' a website receives can be misleading as this really relates to the number of files accessed on the site. This will include picture files, so if a page contains 4 pictures it will register as 5 total 'hits'.  Therefore a more accurate figure for the number of visitors is the number of html pages accessed - each page will register as one hit. 

During the last quarter of 2000, the website received between 5,000 to 7,550 html hits per 
Figure 1.  Monthly number of 'hits' and number of separate clients accessing the EU-SEASED database through the Internet from January 1999 (when the EU-SEASED website was established) to December 2000.

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