[WEB4LIB] Re: Web-based message boards vs. email discussion g

[Lee Jaffe]

I've been struggling with this issue in a very different context recently.
Last spring I started a mailing list, via eGroups, for my high school
class reunion.  One of the features of that free list service was that
the whole list and individual accounts could be set to "individual
emails", "digest" or "no email/Web only."  Therefore, users had the
choice to participate in the discussion as if it was a listserver
(individual email or digests sent to their email inboxes) or as a
newsgroup-like message board, whatever their preferred mode.
Quite a few members of the class wanted to have access to the
list's resources, be able to check on recent discussion, and get
in contact with others as needed, but didn't want to have these
messages intruding into their day-to-day email traffic.  Some were
ready to quit the list after the nth message arguing about the date
of the reunion or the menu, until I showed them the feature which
would turn off email.

eGroups has been taken over by Yahoo with some significant
limitations to the service but the message delivery choices are intact.
Our library uses mailman as a local mailing list manager and just by
the fact that it makes the archive of correspondence accessible via
the Web is again a hybrid of listserver and newsgroup capability.
Of the other similar services I've seen, most offer similar flexibility.
This suggests (and this is the point of all this) that we are passed
the either/or bifurcation of listservers or newsgroups that many of
us learned when we first discovered the Internet.  The Web, if not
really a new technology, offers the means of merging older interfaces
within a single, compatible framework, rending such arguments
pointless.  We aren't forced to choose between mutually-exclusive
systems any longer.

-- Lee Jaffe, UC Santa Cruz
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Lee David Jaffe               Library Computing & Network Services
168B McHenry Library                                 ldjaffe at cats.ucsc.edu
University of California             831.459.3297  fax: 831.459.8206
Santa Cruz, California 95064       http://people.ucsc.edu/~ldjaffe