Division 20
American Psychological Association
Adult Development
and Aging

 

 


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The Division 20 e-mail list traces its origins to a BITNET list of researchers originally collected and maintained by Cameron Camp, then at the University of New Orleans. The initial list consisted of about 20 members, and was collected at the 1986 Gerontological Society of America meetings. The list grew rapidly, with a large growth at the 1988 Cognitive Aging Conference.

Andy Smith (Georgia Tech), the organizer of the Cognitive Aging Conference, and subsequent Division 20 President (1990-91) asked Cameron Camp to become Division 20 Network Coordinator. The responsibilities of that position were primarily the creation and maintenance of a mailing list. Dr. Camp expanded the role of the position to include the e-mail list. Under Denise Park's Division 20 Presidency (1991-92), the list formally changed its identify from "Cameron Camp's Cognitive Aging List" to "The Division 20 e-mail list".

Coincident with Cameron Camp's move from the University of New Orleans to the Myers Research Institute of the Menorah Park Center for Aging in Cleveland, responsibility for the Division 20 Network was assumed by Michael Marsiske, at the Institute of Gerontology of Wayne State University. Wayne State began hosting the list in June 1995. In July of 2000, with Michael Marsiske's move to a new institution, the listserv host changed to University of Florida. In September 2007, Dr. Lise Abrams (Psychology, University of Florida) assumed listserv moderation duties.

In December of 1995, the Division 20 Network responsibilities were expanded to encompass full Internet activities, and the Division 20 World-Wide-Web pages were launched on December 15, 1995. Michael Marsiske has served continuously as the webmaster of the Division's web pages since this time.




The Division 20 pages were launched in December 1995.

Responsibility for organizing the project fell to Michael Marsiske, who was then at the Institute of Gerontology and Department of Psychology of Wayne State University. Page formatting was done by Michael Marsiske and Jarrod Jasper, a graduate student in Psychology at Wayne State. Jarrod was responsible for the early technical oversight of much of this WWW project, and he designed the original logo that adorned all of these pages. That logo built on the logo atop APA's own home page, and drew on a motif created by Roger Morrell on the Division 20 Newsletter.

When Marsiske moved to the University of Florida (UF) in July 2000, the Division 20 web pages moved with him. From 2000-2004, the webpages were hosted by UF's College of Medicine, under the auspices of its Institute on Aging website. Since May 2004, the pages have been hosted by UF's College of Public Health and Health Professions.

In the Spring of 2002, when APA changed its own site-wide logo, APA agreed to provide Division 20 with a new logo as well. This logo was designed by APA's own design staff. The design of several pages, especially the front page, were "freshened up" when the new logo arrived. Again, in November 2004, further revisions were made to bring Division 20 pages into closer stylistic harmony with our organizational "parent". This time, we switched to APA's "Arial" font, and used similar colors throughout. The most substantial revision was made to the front page, which now took on some of APA's "newsletter" design, with heightened graphical content (e.g., photographs, screen shots). This was done to allow the core content of this page to be changed more dynamically, giving it a "newsier" feel. The goal was to update this dynamic content frequently, in the hopes of encouraging more frequent page visits.

Formal oversight of the Division 20 website resides in the hands of the Division 20 executive. The birth of these pages owes a particular debt to our first "work group", which had substantive oversight for the initial design, and which included Michael Marsiske (Network/Internet, 1995- ), Susan Krauss Whitbourne (President, 1995-1996), Steven Zarit (Past President, 1994-1995), John Cavanaugh (President- Elect, 1996-1997), Cameron Camp (Treasurer, 1995-1996; Network/Internet before 1995), Ute Bayen (Education Committee Member liaison to the WWW project, 1995-1996), Rosemary Blieszner (Education Committee Chair, 1995-1996), Karen Hooker (Membership Secretary, 1995-1996) and Roger Morrell (Newsletter Editor, 1995-1996).