In my post "Re: Change or Die: Scholarly E-Mail Lists, Once Vibrant,
Fight for Relevance" [Hake (2009a)] I wrote:
"Young (2009) concludes, on the contrary, that email lists remain "a
key tool that just about everyone opens every day. As long as that's
true, the trusty e-mail list will be valuable to scholars of all
stripes."
To which TIPSter Christopher Green (2009) replied:
"Yes, and the trusty horse and cart continued to find useful work
into the 1940s. That doesn't mean the horse and cart's fate was any
less sealed decades before."
But email lists [more specifically Academic Discussion Lists (ADL's)]
need not be of the TIPS horse-and-buggy type, whose fate was indeed
sealed decades ago.
In the section "Some Weaknesses of the ADLsphere," pp. 32-33 of "Over
Two-Hundred Education & Science Blogs" [Hake (2009b)], I wrote:
"Some List Owners utilize ANTEDILUVIAN SOFTWARE that does not provide
useful archives and/or search engines."
In regard to searchable archives, TIPS list administrator Bill
Southerly (2009) wrote:
". . . .as long-term subscribers of TIPS know, I have often not had
support for what I have tried to do with TIPS and have had to deal
with decisions made by administrators who have no clue what their
decisions would do to TIPS (e.g., our loss of searchable archives
from the beginning of TIPS that we once had)."
In contrast, in the section "Some Strengths of the ADLsphere,"
pp.31-32, I wrote:
"Discussion lists running on the popular LISTSERV
<http://www.lsoft.com/> software feature excellent archives and
powerful search engines that allow searches by keywords, author,
subject title, date, or any combination of those. I know of no such
search engines in the Blogosphere."
Of course, there are numerous other advantages to ADL's running on
*modern* software, as discussed in the section "Some Strengths of the
ADLsphere" of "Over Two-Hundred Education & Science Blogs" [Hake
(2009b)].
Richard Hake, Emeritus Professor of Physics, Indiana University
24245 Hatteras Street, Woodland Hills, CA 91367
Honorary Member, Curmudgeon Lodge of Deventer, The Netherlands.
<[email protected]>
<http://www.physics.indiana.edu/~hake/>
<http://www.physics.indiana.edu/~sdi/>
<http://HakesEdStuff.blogspot.com/>
REFERENCES
Green, C. 2009. "Re: Change or Die: Scholarly E-Mail Lists, Once
Vibrant, Fight for Relevance," TIPS post of 03 Jul 2009
07:27:28-0700; online at
<http://www.mail-archive.com/tips%40acsun.frostburg.edu/msg29930.html.html>.
Hake, R.R. 2009a. "Re: Change or Die: Scholarly E-Mail Lists, Once
Vibrant, Fight for Relevance #2," online on the OPEN! AERA-L archives
at <http://tinyurl.com/l37toq>. Post of 2 Jul 2009 17:28:53-0700 to
AERA-L and on 2 Jul 2009 20:08:00 to Net-Gold. The abstract was
transmitted to various discussion lists and is also at
<http://hakesedstuff.blogspot.com/2009/07/re-change-or-die-scholarly-e-mail-lists.html>
with a provision for comments.
Hake, R.R. 2009b. "Over Two-Hundred Education & Science Blogs," 30
March; online at
<http://www.physics.indiana.edu/~hake/Over200EdSciBlogsU.pdf> (2.6
MB). The abstract is also at
<http://hakesedstuff.blogspot.com/2009/03/over-two-hundred-education-science.html>
with a provision for comments.
Southerly, B. 2009. "Re: Change or Die: Scholarly E-Mail Lists, Once
Vibrant, Fight for Relevance, TIPS post of 30 Jun 2009 09:42:09-0700;
online at
<http://www.mail-archive.com/tips%40acsun.frostburg.edu/msg29896.html>.
Young, J.R. 2009. "Change or Die: Scholarly E-Mail Lists, Once
Vibrant, Fight for Relevance," Chronicle of Higher Education, 29
June; online at <http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i40/40college2.0.htm>;
copied into the AERA-L Archives at <http://tinyurl.com/l37toq>. As
of 2 July 2009 15:18:00
there had been 14 comments at
<http://chronicle.com/forums/index.php?topic=61387.0>.
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