At first this had to be done with printed books, but this was costly in terms of both time and money, which limited access to the volumes. Our web site gets up to 10,000 hits per month, many from non-educational domains.
Typical users range from grade school students to college students to curious web surfers.
To help make the information useful to both specialists and non-specialists alike, intuitive, graphical interfaces have been used both to get queries from users and to present the data. Also, to look at information about a particular informant, users first click on the state, from the overall survey map, in which the informant lives, and are then presented with a more detailed map of the state with the locations of the informants shown by labeled dots. By clicking on a label, users can see information about the informant. While this is intuitive enough, until the summer of 1997 users could only get information about one informant at a time. At that time, a web-based form was established to enable searches of the informant database, which solved the immediate problem.