[WEB4LIB] Re: "Talking About Public Access: PACS-L's First Decade"

[Roy Tennant]

One small clarification regarding list statistics. I spend a good deal of
time "cleaning up" (removing 'dead' email addresses) the subscription list
for Web4Lib. Therefore, I will stand behind Web4Lib statistics as being
up-to-date and accurate as much as is humanly possible. I can also attest
to the fact that the lists sees quite a bit of "churn" (people coming on,
people going off), despite the fact that we seem to have leveled off
recently at 3,100 - 3,200 subscribers. 
Roy Tennant

On Wed, 5 Apr 2000, Charles W. Bailey, Jr. wrote:

> 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.
> 
> 
>