"Talking About Public Access: PACS-L's First Decade"

[Charles W. Bailey, Jr.]

Thanks to Roy and Dan for the kudos.

Walt used PACS-L subscription figures that I supplied from list 
subscription snapshots that I did and stored each month.  Any errors are 
mine, not his.

Roy is correct to be skeptical about such counts.  I did mention to Walt 
that subscription reports for lists are imprecise because inactive users 
can be set to nomail and remain on the list.  Nonetheless, these counts do 
provide some broad indication of list subscription trends, and, since 
correcting them is not feasible, they are the best indicator that we have 
for measuring list growth.  Having spent some time in recent months trying 
to come up with reasonably accurate and meaningful use statistics for my 
Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography using Apache logs, I feel 
confident in saying that you should take first-cut Web site statistics with 
a large grain of salt as well.