 |
 |
O.K. It is the time of the year when, overworked, tired at the end of a hard, hot day, some of us slip and send messages to the wrong address. Please, oh, please accept our truly heartfelt apologies. I bet we'll never sin again if we can survive the stoning! Of course this happens when our precious monitor is on a well deserved vacation and a lot of us have been doing summer cleaning of our duplicates. Yes, in my opinion we should definitely stick to a standard subject heading for this extremely useful "swap" activity. Actually we should have two headings: "Duplicate periodicals offer" and "Duplicate periodicals request." Other than at peak season, during the so called "quiet " intersessions, how many messages of the kind we receive in a given day? Has anybody kept count? Has anybody been comparing their number with the booksellers' catalog updates or other classes of messages that do not necessarily interest ALL the subscribers? Why split a listserv for a few messages that can be easily deleted when they can be identified at a glance? Debbie has a good point there. And Mona is absolutely right: not all of us have ready access to the web yet. Also not everyone has the time to do it within minutes of the posting of duplicate lists, when minutes are determining whether you get the issues you have been after for 19 years... Another thought: would a new subscriber to ARLIS-L, who may not be able to afford to belong to ARLIS-NA, know that the swap possibility exist somewhere in the ARLIS cyberspace? BACKSERV is well known but too generic for us. PLease keep the swap on this list AND STANDARDIZE!!! From: Lee Sorensen <[log in to unmask]> Some years ago, when the problem wasn't as bad as it is now, I suggested via the ARLIS-L that, A) members keep the listserve to topics relevant to our business (which more or less has happened), and B) that each of us *try* to follow subject naming guidelines, i.e., that the gist of the message could be gleaned in that field. The usual emotional reactions about freedom, and about the amount of time it takes to delete messages trickled in--a number of which from people no did not belong to ARLIS(!). Janine, Maja and others are quite right: for those of us who have to get a lot of work accomplished each day and who receive masses of email, it's essential to know the basic content of a message. The amount of time it takes to figure out which 40 messages a day (in my case) are not relevant and delete them *is* a lot. I suspect more members are going to have this problem in the future. Anything that could be done to make the listserve more efficient to our membership would be appreciated. Lee Sorensen Duke University South Regional Representative ARLIS/NA and acting Web Administrator >If everyone used a standard subject heading, as Janine suggests, it would >be quite easy to hit the delete key. As it is now, many people use only a >serial title or some other unhelpful heading, so we end up having to pull >up those messages only to find that they are of no interest to us. When >all of the ARLIS messages are mixed in with all of our other messages, it >does get tedious wading through them. > >Maja Keech, Reference Specialist >Prints and Photographs Division >Library of Congress > >On Wed, 22 Jul 1998, Williams - Douglas >M. wrote: > >> Really folks, how hard is it to hit the delete key? >>