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)
|