ESUN

Five Years of Service to the Sarcoma Community
and a New Beginning

By Bruce Shriver, PhD
Editor-in-Chief, ESUN

This year, the Liddy Shriver Sarcoma Initiative reached its fifth anniversary. In the past five years, we have published 30 issues of ESUN. We have raised over $1,250,000 for sarcoma research, sponsored 22 peer-reviewed research studies, grown the Team Sarcoma Initiative from 7 people to over 8,000 people world wide, and maintained an increasing amount of information on our website. We are grateful to everyone who has contributed to these accomplishments.

We begin our sixth year with a completely redesigned website. One appreciates the significance of the new website when one understands the effort that was involved in creating it. In February of this year, I took stock of the information that we had accumulated. We have published almost 1,000 pages of sarcoma-related material. This includes over 550 pages of peer-reviewed feature articles, over 400 pages of Op Ed pieces by well known physicians, nurses, and advocates in the sarcoma community, and material in our regular columns. We also had the abstracts of several hundred sarcoma related clinical trials on our website.

However this substantial library of material wasn’t easy to access. Because it wasn’t easy to access, it was not the useful resource that it could be for the sarcoma community. Given this, we redesigned our website and implemented it in contemporary web development technology.

The new website (the one you are visiting right now!) allows you to more easily locate material through a Sarcoma Learning Center, a Clinical Trials Learning Center, and a Research Center. We have also provided search mechanisms that are accessible throughout the website. We’ve added a number of features and have peppered 1-minute videos of sarcoma oncologists and nurses discussing various sarcoma topics throughout the website.

Our new website is the product of the creative mind of Mary Sorens. She not only shared the vision we had for making the information we have more accessible, but she actually brought this vision to fruition. She has spent an untold number of hours in designing and redesigning, implementing and re-implementing, and constantly testing her ideas. There is absolutely no question that without Mary’s energy, commitment, drive, determination and creative and fertile mind, the new website would not exist. She has made it all happen. Her attention to detail to make your visit to the website more productive has been nothing short of amazing. As a sarcoma survivor and as the creator and developer of the Adult Bone Cancer Survivors website and community, she could constantly approach the design with a unique perspective. We owe her our deepest gratitude for what she has accomplished, and are delighted to have her as the new Associate Editor of ESUN and the Webmaster for the Liddy Shriver Sarcoma Initiative.

Because of the enormous amount of material that has to be put into the format of the new website, the process of migration is requiring a substantial investment in time. I elected to deploy the website while this migration process is still ongoing, simply because the new website is so much more functional and useful than our previous website. We are maintaining a searchable backup of our previous website during this transition process so you still have access to the entire library of information we have. We welcome any comments you might have about our website.