[WEB4LIB] Re: Library Hi-Tech News piece

[Sloan, Bernie]

Yes, Web4Lib did steal some of PACS-L's thunder. See the following excerpt
from Walt Crawford's " Talking About Public Access: PACS-L's First Decade."
(Full article available at: http://home.att.net/~wcc.libmedx/pacsl.htm) 

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Diffusion: Other Lists, Other Methods

Bernie Sloan suggests that one reason for the decline of PACS-L was "the
retention of fairly tight editorial policies that may have worked well when
PACS-L was the only game in town, but didn't work quite so well given the
availability of other (unmoderated) lists"-but he also thinks that PACS-L's
decline had much to do with "the appearance of many other library-related
lists (drawing away PACS-L traffic)."

Nancy Buchanan agrees that the most important factor in the decline of
PACS-L as a topical forum was "the proliferation of other, more specific
lists." There were many other electronic fora available by 1999: hundreds
(if not thousands) of library-related lists. To some extent, that explosion
of lists diffused the role of PACS-L-but as the largest of all library
lists, it continued to be a prime venue for the kind of messages that don't
invite discussion.

Jim Morgan (Indiana University Purdue) notes: "A lot of the lively
discussion on PACS-L migrated to other lists. I know when CDROMLAN formed a
lot of the important technical discussion migrated there, and when WEB4LIB
started up it instantly attracted most of the lively discussion on all
topics." Bill Drew comments: "The same hardcore characters show up in lots
of the lists. I see several people from PACS-L and WEB4LIB on the new
EZProxy list, occasionally on COLLIB-L and even that relatively slow list
SYSLIB-L."


-----Original Message-----
From: Thomas Dowling [mailto:tdowling at ohiolink.edu] 
Sent: Monday, January 06, 2003 3:16 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list
Subject: [WEB4LIB] Re: Library Hi-Tech News piece

At 03:56 PM 1/6/2003, Karen G. Schneider wrote:
>Hah, Web4Lib is practically a baby, compared to PUBLIB, founded in
>December, 1992, or AUTOCAT, December 1990!


But Web4Lib is a conceptual descendant of Go4Lib, which dates back to the 
early 1990s, and (IMO) Web4Lib continued the original themes of PACS-L from 
the late '80s better than PACS-L itself.


Thomas Dowling
OhioLINK - Ohio Library and Information Network
tdowling at ohiolink.edu