[WEB4LIB] WEB4LIB digest 2151

[JQ Johnson]

A few more cents (maybe 3?) on the listserver vs web based bulletin board
discussion:

1/ there are lots of auxilliary tools, many of which blur the distinction.
Want to segregate your web4lib email and keep it separate from your regular
mail so it's not so distracting?  Write a procmail or whatever filter that
moves it into a separate folder as it arrives.  Want to use a web browser as
your email interface on public workstations?  Install silkymail on your web
server.  On the other hand, very few email packages do as good a job of
managing threaded discussions as do the better discussion board/USEnet
news/conferencing system packages, and the message composition/proofing tools
in most web-based discussion packages are rather inferior to those in a good
MUA.

2/ The range of both forums is very large, much larger than most of us have
experience with.  And there are exemplars of particular discussions that fit
almost any model.  For example, there are many many highly specialized
discussion groups that might seem like naturals for email but that you might
still choose to read using a different tool.  One that I participate in is the
cygwin list (for discussion of that software package, which provides free
linux-derived tools that run on Windows).  I read it in its bulletin board
form, but I do read it fairly regularly.  Why not subscribe by email?  Because
I don't want to be deluged in dozens of additional messages every day, and
find that the integration of the bulletin board with other web resources makes
it easier for me to deal with than a procmail filter.  The point here being
that people who receive very high volumes of email (e.g., more than 200
msgs/day) may need ways to avoid having the email "integrated into their basic
routines".  On the other hand, a whole-class discussion list for a large
university course would normally require a bulletin board system (typically
integrated into the course management system, e.g. blackboard or webct), but
there are occasionally reasons why one might want to export the whole
discussion as email, and are certainly lots of cases where a shared discussion
needs to spin off into a private (presumably email) discussion.

3/ This has been mentioned, but for librarians is worth repeating: one big
advantage of web based bulletin boards is that they provide a natural central
point for archival.  Too many listservers fail to be archived, or have an
archive that is not easily accessible to the readers.  Both technologies allow
archives; the issue here is degree of integration.

JQ Johnson                      Office: 115F Knight Library
Academic Education Coordinator  mailto:jqj at darkwing.uoregon.edu
1299 University of Oregon       phone: 1-541-346-1746; -3485 fax
Eugene, OR  97403-1299          http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~jqj/