Today marks PhilPapers' second anniversary. This is a good occasion to review our progress, and to announce a new project which has just been awarded JISC funding.

PhilPapers' growth

Today PhilPapers receives about 300,000 visitors per month, or 10,000 per day. There are over 20,000 registered PhilPapers users. About 60% of registered users are faculty members or graduate students in a philosophy department.

It is not just the user base that has grown phenomenally in two years. The index of entries has grown from about 180,000 items to over 330,000 items, thanks in good part to the increasing collaboration of publishers.

Our tests indicate that our coverage of English-language professional publications in philosophy is ahead of commercial indices by many measures.  We have also received over 10,000 submissions directly from users. Those submissions, together with website harvesting and a rich
set of online tools for researchers, have made PhilPapers a unique resource for keeping up with the latest research in philosophy even before it is published.

The PhilPapers categorization project, which aims to provide comprehensive bibliographies across all areas of philosophy, has also been progressing at a good pace.  There are now about 170 editors covering about 800 categories. Large swathes of the category structure are very well furnished and curated. There are still many editorships to fill, of course, so we continue to encourage qualified individuals to become editors.

A new project: PhilEvents

We are pleased to announce that the Institute of Philosophy in the School of Advanced Study, University of London has been awarded a grant of £79,000 from JISC to develop the PhilEvents project. The School of Advanced Study will match these funds to ensure that PhilEvents is as successful as its sibling, PhilPapers.

PhilEvents will track events in philosophy throughout the English-speaking world: conferences, workshops, talks, and so on.  It will provide a simple means of monitoring all events based on criteria which combine location and topic. In the process it will create an online ecosystem for the distribution of digitised events, including audiovisual materials.  PhilEvents is due to launch in October 2011.