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)