Dear colleagues,

I am proud to announce that the new European Cetacean Society web page is now on-line after some major revisions at: www.EuropeanCetaceanSociety.EU.

The new template was presented last your during the 2008 Annual meeting of the ECS and amongst the new facilities there is now an on-line interface to register for the annual Conference, to renew the annual membership and to submit abstracts. We are also implementing on-line abstract review, which will be operative soon. The site has been designed and implemented by Luke Verburgt, who I wish to thank for all his work and help during this process.

On behalf of the whole ECS Council, I would also like to take this opportunity for publicly warmly thanking Jan Willem Broekema for all his work, dedication and commitment within the ECS web page and all computer-related issues since its birth in 1987. The following text comes from the ECS web page and briefly explains some of the tasks that Jan Willem has covered throughout the years.

From 1987 until 1993, the European Cetacean Society had a working group, chaired by Jan Willem Broekema, on computer-related issues associated with the exchange of strandings and sightings data. This Computer Working Group may seem superfluous today but it wasn't at the time. The ECS was introduced to internet by the European Union in the pre-web days of 1992, shortly before the web (HTML) concept and the browser (Mosaic) were invented in 1993. At the time the European Cetacean Society was a Special Interest Group (SIG) within a major EUreka project, introducing international scholars to internet usage. Our ECS mailing lists have existed ever since those days.

The working group was dissolved and the role of web editor was introduced in 1993, when the first ECS pages were set up. The original site was designed to be very fast and light and available to any browser anywhere, and easy to maintain. Frames were introduced in 2003 and a major overhaul created a new set of mailing lists, of which ECS-Talk is the most prominent. In 2003 Jan Willem shortened the site's address to www.broekemaweb.nl/ecs and in 2006 introduced and registered the domain name www.EuropeanCetaceanSociety.EU.

I look forward to seeing many of you at the next annual meeting of the ECS in Istanbul, Turkey, on March 2-4 2009 ( http://www.tudav.org/ecs2009/).

With my best regards,

Simone Panigada
ECS, Chair