This site can be read by everybody interested in History of Science and Technology worldwide. To use the interactive possibilities offered by Web 2.0 tools, which will be progressively added, historians of science (professional, students, amateurs) need to register.
1 In order to register send an email with your data to info@dhstweb.org. According to disponibility you will get an email account (like: j.smith@dhstweb.org) and a password (provided to DHST by Google Applications for Your Domain) that will let you have access to a number of tools. Registration is free. The tools already implemented or that will progressively be implemented are:
2 Email: 2 Gbytes of disk space for your mail. It works like Gmail, and allows to easily use the list of contacts of all other members. Of course it is possible to readdress the incoming mail to your main account (or viceversa!).
3 Voip through Talk (chat, talk and exchange files with other members). You need to download the free software, make yourself “available”, invite a contact to accept your calls. Moreover utilizing Skype you can have a conference call (up to 9 users +host) and broadcast live (up to 100 users).
4 Calendars: manage a number of personal Calendars (compatible with Outlook and others), access the DHST Calendar (DHST and other HOST events) and all the other public calendars.
From now on tools are not provided by Google Applications for Your Domain but can be accessed opening a Google account with your j.smith"@dhstweb.org" user name and password (you do not need a Gmail account except for Page Creator).
5 Groups: access the DHST Groups, basically cooperation tools on specific topics. The Council and each Commission will have a Group. Groups endorsed by DHST can be added according to specific needs and will be moderated; in principle Groups discussions can be read by everybody, participation is allowed only to Group members (acceptance is under the responsibility of the moderator). Groups allow easy communication between group members (not necessarily through email!), easy uploading of files and (for the Group manager) publication of web pages (100 MBytes each group), publication of members own profiles (making it easier to identify colleagues with similar research interests). It is a basic tool to build and participate in a community without being submerged by email messages or having to join web sites for students (like Myspace or Facebook).
6 Blogs: DHSTweb members will be entitled to comment and/or post on the site Blog and on all the other DHST Blogs that will be published, allowing better interaction between members and DHST officials.
7 Web pages: publish easily your own web pages with Page Creator (with 100 MBytes of disk space to build your personal web site and upload your files). [ allowed by Google through a standard Gmail account]
8 Personalise your own home page with a number of “gadgets” that will let you control at a glance most of the tools discussed so far (and others).
9 News: Rss and Atom technology allow easy update of information (already widely adopted by the main news commercial sites). Information once selected is available through your own browser or special applications called readers (e.g.: Reader) or aggregators. It is possible for instance to receive the table of contents of the latest issue of the main HOST journals (a freely delivered “current contents”). We are working at making this available to all on the DHST website.
10 Tags: to informally generate internet taxonomies (folksonomies). If you classify web pages of interest, you can have at hands your bookmarks and share them with the community (social bookmarking). This would dramatically improve access to relevant HOST materials. Software is provided by Del.icio.us (Yahoo) and more recently by Notebook (Google).
11 Wikis: the extraordinary success of Wikipedia has publicised the possibility of collaborative authoring through appropriate software programmes (or web sites) called wikis. DHSTweb members can start using Writely and Google Spreadsheets through their dhstweb.org account and password.
12 Podcasts: Basically a recorded video or audio file that can be downloaded and utilized asynchronously. A form of narrowcasting (“broadband/narrowcast, narrowband/broadcast”) “Podcasting is the method of distributing multimedia files, such as audio or video programs, over the Internet using syndication feeds, for playback on mobile devices and personal computers.” Could be very useful for spreading talks, interviews, lessons and for educational purposes.