[Web4lib] Fifteen years of filling your mailbox

[Roy Tennant]

It suddenly occurred to me today that approximately two weeks ago Web4Lib
passed its Fifteenth Anniversary. The list was started on May 12, 1994. I
began it at UC Berkeley to help the Web team there plan for the UC Berkeley
Library web site, which was to replace our Gopher-based Internet information
system. It was modeled on, and inspired by, the Go4Lib list started by
Andrea Duda at UC Santa Barbara.

It has been a sometimes wild and sometimes calm trip since then, with spikes
of active debate over such topics as filtering. Some of us still have scars
to prove it. These controversies also helped shape the management of the
list. We began with few, if any, policies, and accreted them only when
behavior on the list demanded it. I established an Advisory Board of trusted
colleagues to help with questions of policy, and to prevent me from becoming
even more of a tyrant than I already was. The members: Thomas Dowling, Karen
Schneider, and Bernie Sloan have all served since the beginning of the
Board, and have provided essential advice and support for many years.

List membership grew quickly in the early years, and seemed to plateau for a
while at around 3,200 subscribers. Today we are at 4,746 subscribers. For a
while I was able to break down the membership by country or domain, which
you can view at <http://lists.webjunction.org/web4lib/subscribers.html>. I
haven¹t done it recently, but suffice it to say that we are not surprisingly
dominated by subscribers from the U.S., Canada, and the English-speaking
world, although our subscriber base hails from many countries the world
over.

A number of years ago, and well before I joined OCLC, I migrated the list
from the SunSITE server at Berkeley, which was on a slow decommission path,
to the welcoming arms of WebJunction. This established a home for it that
could continue without me or my place of employment continuing to commit to
maintain it. 

It may seem like this is a self-serving message designed to solicit ³good
job² replies, but that isn¹t my intent. I started the list because I
personally wanted help, and that¹s exactly what I got. I¹ve had 15 years
worth of other people solving my problems and giving me useful advice. If
there is a balance somewhere keeping track, I¹d expect it to be sinking on
the side of what I owe you all, not the other way around. Thanks for being
here,
Roy