Judith,
Thanks so much for your synopsis of this article. As an owner of three
educational lists and an academic who uses discussion lists as an integral
part of my curriculum (actually, I'm writing my dissertation about the
benefits of electronic discussion for writing classes), it was a very
"scary" piece to read.
In fact, the technical services dept. at the institution where I teach
refuses to even set up the listserv software that we already own, much less
maintain it. Thankfully, I am also a doctoral student at a large university
(Texas A&M) which (currently, anyway) provides free listservs for all
faculty, staff, and students.
Thanks again,
Larry
Lawrence J. Clark
Owner, AMLIT2-L, GATSBY-L, TEKCOM-L
Director, The Gatsby Project
Regional Director, East Texas/Louisiana Alliance for Computers and Writing
Professor, English
Tomball College
Tomball, TX
> I thought the subscribers to this list would be interested in an
>article in the November 3, 1995 issue of the Chronicle of Higher
>Education. Entitled "Burden on Computers Causes Concerns over Internet
>Lists" (pp. A.34-A36) I will just quote selected bits.
>
> "Professors who manage Internet mailing lists say they are under
> increasing pressure from budget-conscious administrators to minimize
> the burden their services put on college computers."
>
> "The pressure comes as interest in the Internet is growing among
> scholars.... There are about 2,500 lists of a largely academic nature
> and many thousands more that are of general interest."
>
> With little money for expanding computer systems on many campuses,
> the massisve amounts of data churned out by some lists are forcing an
> evolution in the way they work. Even with those changes, which improve
> the ways the lists use resources, some institutions may be unable to
> continue contributing to the Internet as freely as they have in the past."
>
> "On some campuses, list administrators have been asked to show how
> a list directly benefits students and faculty members at the institution.
> Without a strong defender on the campus, some lists have bounced from
> place to place, searching for a computer system they can call home."
>
> "On other campuses, list owners have been urged to stop using electronic
> mail and to shift the listss' functions fo USENET... [which] typically
> employs network resources more efficiently than an e-mail list."
>
> "The option that list managers are turning to most often involves
> shifting the lists to what is known as a "digest" format..."
>
> The article describes policies at some institutions, chiefly the
> University of Kentucky, and the travails of EDNET at Umass and of the
> three lists focussed on India (45,000 subscribers) run by K.V. Rao of
> Bowling Green State University.
>
> While "Kentucky is fairly tolerant of lists" ... Other institutions
> already have made plans for limiting lists. Kent State University
> supports about 100 lists, with the smallest made up of just a few dozen
> subscribers and the largest with more than 9,000. The costs of
> administering the lists include more than just hardware, says Christine
> Shih, a systems analyst with the university's department of information
> systems. Administrators, she says, often spend time sorting through a
> swamp of electronic messages. 'We have to constantly be on topi of the
> disk-space situation. We have to go in every couple of weeks to clean
> things up.'"
>
> "The problems have led to some fierce debates on the campus. 'It's a
> a very big issue, and we have been thinking about trying to cut back on
> the big lists that are hosted here... We were talking about maybe 1,000
> or 2,000 subscribers at the top cutoff point.'"
>
> " 'It's really draining our resources, and maybe we will come to a
> point where we have to limit the size of the lists that are hosted here.
> But we haven't done anything -- yet.' "
>
> Judith Hopkins, Listowner of Autocat at UBVM, a list that just
> this week pruned off about 1,000 subscribers (from a high of 3,600)
>
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