[Web4lib] Are e-mail discussion lists still relevant?

[bgsloan2 at yahoo.com]

I think one's perception of the relevance of e-mail discussion lists depends a lot on which lists you're looking at. 

If you looked at lists like collib-l, LIBLICENSE, or Web4Lib, you might conclude that discussion lists are alive and well

But if you looked at a list like PACS-L you'd probably conclude that e-mail lists are a dying, if not already dead, medium. That list used to be a vibrant forum for discussion. Now it's moribund, with no discussion whatsoever...only 29 postings in the last three months of fiscal year 2009, and all were announcements. Contrast this with Web4Lib which has probably had more than 29 postings on just this one thread in less than a week.

The LIBADMIN list is similar. There used to be a lot of discussion there, but now when I get a post from that list my reaction is something along the lines of "Oh, I'd sorta forgotten LIBADMIN still existed".

There's another list that deals with a popular library topic that saw only 100 posts for the first six months of 2009. Almost all of those posts were announcements (and a fair number were off-topic advertisements). There is virtually no discussion, and this list has more than 900 subscribers.

Bernie Sloan

--- On Mon, 6/29/09, B.G. Sloan <bgsloan2 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> From: B.G. Sloan <bgsloan2 at yahoo.com>
> Subject: [Web4lib] Are e-mail discussion lists still relevant?
> To: web4lib at webjunction.org
> Date: Monday, June 29, 2009, 10:34 PM
>  
> Young, Jeffrey R. Change or Die: Scholarly E-Mail Lists,
> Once Vibrant, Fight for Relevance. Chronicle of Higher
> Education. June 25, 2009.
> http://beta.chronicle.com/article/Change-or-Die-Scholarly/46962/
>  
> The intro paragraph: 
>  
> "Once they were hosts to lively discussions about academic
> style and substance, but the time of scholarly e-mail lists
> has passed, meaningful posts slowing to a trickle as
> professors migrate to blogs, wikis, Twitter, and social
> networks like Facebook."
>  
> Several quotes from librarians...
>  
> Bernie Sloan
> Sora Associates
> 
> 
> 
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