Cyanosite History and Awards


Cyanosite Archives

Cyanosite Awards and Distinctions

Cyanosite has been selected for inclusion in online curated information portals and has been recognized with a number of web awards for content and design.

The History of Cyanosite

Creation and Development

Cyanosite was created in the Department of Biological Sciences at Purdue University in 1994 from an earlier LISTSERV. A replica of the Vintage version of Cyanosite from August of 1995 appears here. Cyanosite incorporated materials from CyanoNews, a newsletter for cyanobacteriologists published 1985-2003 by Dr. Jeff Elhai (Virginia Commonwealth University). An earlier website for the NASA Specialized Center of Research and Training (NSCORT) at Purdue University paved the way for Cyanosite. The Classic appearance of Cyanosite was created in 1997 and maintained for 15 years. Cyanosite was revised in October 2012 in both appearance and structure.

Resources for Research

Cyanosite houses resources for cyanobacteria researchers. A library of links to websites specific to cyanobacteria was one of the earliest features on Cyanosite. All of the links were annotated in 2001 by students supported through a July 1999 grant from the Waksman Foundation for Microbiology. Today the links library is a curated collection of vetted websites with information about cyanobacteria. The links library was updated in March 2019 with annotations that were rewritten to reflect the current content of listed websites. The links were last updated May 2022. Nearly 60 growth medium recipes were added to Cyanosite in April 1998. This compilation of printed sources and recipes from culture collections represents the largest existing compilation of cyanobacterial growth medium recipes. Cyanosite maintains a small collection of protocols relevant to cyanobacteria contributed by Cyanosite users. These used to include pioneer applications for the Classic Macintosh platform such as a pigment calculator. The most influential cyanobacterial taxonomic schemes are available on Cyanosite. In 2011 Cyanosite temporarily hosted a virtual hard drive of phylogenetic tools from Pasteur Institute. Announcements for meetings, courses, books, and jobs have appeared on Cyanosite at various times.

Cyanobacterial Image Gallery

An image gallery was added to Cyanosite in October 1997. Dr. Roger Burks (University of California at Riverside) graciously provided nearly 100 images that remain the core of the collection. The first cyanobacterial video to appear online was contributed by Dr. Agnieszka Pajdak-Stos (Jagiellonian University) and made available in July 1998. The image gallery now has over 250 images and continues to grow through user submissions. Each year Cyanosite provides dozens of images for major textbooks, scientific books and journals, museum displays, public health materials, television documentaries, businesses, encyclopedias, and popular science products around the world.

Toxic Cyanobacteria Home Page

An early website on harmful algal blooms by Dr. Benedict Long (The Australian National University) was created in 1996 at Latrobe University. For a time, the Toxic Cyanobacteria Home Page worked with Cyanosite to mirror CyanoNews online. Late in 2001, Cyanosite absorbed the Toxic Cyanobacteria Home Page. New materials were added during a revision in 2007. A replica of the Toxic Cyanobacteria Home Page from 1999 was assembled from internet archives and added to Cyanosite in 2012.

CyBib Cyanobacterial Bibliography

The CyBib bibliography of cyanobacterial literature first appreared on Cyanosite in August 1997. Initial citations were culled from CyanoNews. The original database contained >2500 references presented in three different importable bibliographic formats and three different downloadable file formats. A few months later, CyBib was updated with the addition of over 1500 references. Cybib v3.0 was released in January 1998 with over 5300 citations, better coverage of 1989-90, and several thousand small formatting changes, corrections, and emendments. CyBib v3.5 was released in September 1998 with over 6700 references and CyBib v4.0 in June 2000 contained over 11,000 references. August 2001 saw the sixth edition of the bibliography, CyBib v4.5, with over 12,000 references. The database doubled in size in 2003 to nearly 25,000 references as it migrated to the servers at Wichita State University and online searches were enabled, but then disabled in 2019. CyBib v5, was archived in its final form as CyBib Archive in August 2012, a curated collection of field-tagged cyanobacterial literature citations through 2002.

Awards and Distinctions

Cyanosite endures as the premier website for cyanobacteria research after nearly 20 years on the web. Cyanosite's philosophy has always been to keep it simple to broaden access. It is a utilitarian site offering extensive databases of resources and media assets. Cyanosite has been fortunate to recieve a variety of awards and distinctions. Cyanosite was honored with inclusion in Science Central (8/10/97), was chosen Web Pick of the Day by the HMS Beagle (2/26/98), and was selected by the Internet Scout Project (2/13/98). Cyanosite was included in the Nearctica database (9/29/98), was given the Argus Clearinghouse seal of approval (10/2/98), and was added to ISI Current Web Contents (01/10/01). It was presented an Artsy Award (06/23/01) and was recognized with the Dr. Matrix Science Excellence Award (05/07/02). Cyanosite was featured in the Spotlight section of Microbes.info (06/08/03) and was added to the Encyclopedia Britannica Internet Guide (10/11/06) as a top resource on cyanobacteria. A review of Cyanosite was published in the prestigious journal Science on 4/24/98, another review was published in Genetic Engineering News on 9/15/98, and a third appeared in Protist in 2001.

Cyanosite Archives

Cyanosite first added About pages during revision to the Classic website in 1997 to provide a history of Cyanosite and revisions. A replica of the Vintage version of Cyanosite from 1995 was created. Nearly all external links were killed in the archive and a later revision removed the outdated 1995 Directory of Cyanobacteriologists and Cyanobacteriologist Email Directory from the Vintage website. As part of the Cyanosite revision of 2012, the Classic website of 1997-2012 was archived. Resources provided in simplified html code for ancient browsers (Netscape 2.0 or earlier) are still available on the Classic website but were no longer be updated. Links to current equivalent pages are given where appropriate. CyanoNews Archive is a complete collection of CyanoNews issues from 1993 to 2003, with several electronic versions recovered from internet archives was compiled in 2013. A replica of the Toxic Cyanobacteria Home Page as it existed in its final version in 1999 was assembled in 2012 using archival remnants recovered from the Internet Wayback Machine. Note that both of these archives contain material that was not compiled by Cyanosite and are presented as historical records subject to this disclaimer. The history of Cyanosite you are reading was last updated in May 2022.

Supported by Biological Sciences at Purdue University and by Wichita State University