billy graham center archives
2003 annual report
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Billy Graham Center

Wayne showing a class of students from Moody Bible Institute how to use the Archives's Web site (digitally projected behind him) to find documents about the history of evangelism


"Thank you, thank you, thank you, for making the two Jim Elliot sermons available online. I have read much over the years about him and always wondered what his voice sounded like. It has been said you can see a photo of someone and you know something about them but when you hear their voice you know so much more. Praise God it is possible to hear someone, like Abel, who (though) "being dead yet speaketh" for the Glory of God! Someone who has been in Heaven for 47 years! It thrills my soul but boggles my mind." E-mail message from a minister in Alabama regarding the Jim Elliot sermons the staff made available via the Web.


This year the Archives staff was able to get much more detailed information on the use of the Archives Web site, thanks to assistance from the College's Computing Services department. Here are some of the figures (because the statistics program was inaugurated in February, it does not cover the entire year.)
    Number of hits: 3,279,605
    Number of unique users: 211,903
    Number of page views: 1,155,512
    Average length of visit: 12 minutes, 21 seconds
    Our Web site has thousands of individual pages, and visitiors had many favorites (click here to see a list of some of the most popular). Most of the visitor sessions came from the United States (375,612). However, there were at least a thousand sessions from each of the following countries: Canada, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Australia, Singapore, Japan, Germany, France, New Zealand, Brazil, Hong Kong, Philippines, Belgium, Sweden.
The most significant addition to the Web page this year was an online exhibit entitled Jazz Age Evangelism: Paul Rader and the Chicago Gospel Tabernacle. This exhibit was an extensive documentation of the impact of this pioneering ministry, with over 160 pages of documents, photos, transcripts, audio clips and a film from the 1920s.

One indication of use is the number of other sites that link to ours. These links continued to increase. Click here for a sampling of other pages that link to the BGC Archives web site.

Among the pages we added to our web site in 2003 were: