On Wed, 1 Dec 1993 03:43:10 EST FAST FISH said:
 
>... 1) would it be a good practice to reduce the size
>of the notebooks correspondingly as I take the various
>related messages out of them and place them in files?
 
Depends what your objectives are.  Talking them out of your notebooks
will mean that people will no longer find them when they search.  One
way around this may be to post to the list explaining that such items
are now in another file.  Include enough keywords in your explanatory
post such that it is likely to be found.
 
>Is that commonly done on other fileservers?
 
We edit notebooks on some of our lists, mainly to take out "junk" postings,
such as the "please unsubscribe me" type stuff.  This saves disk space and
makes searches faster since there is less to search through.  Editing a
notebook can cause problems though - specifically, if subscribers are using
the INDEX option the index numbers will change when the notebooks are edited,
leading to temporary confusion.
 
>2) is there any way that fileserver files can be
>included in Listserv searches,
 
Everything is possible, of course, but there is no SIMPLE way to do this,
though I understand it has been done.  You have to write a database driver
to work with the individual items.  Certainly if the individual items are
just pieces of notebooks then the existing notebook database driver (LSVDBNB)
is pretty useable as is, though you still have to tell LISTSERV what files
are in your database (the DBNAMES files), create an index to your database
(the DBINDEX files), and, indeed, tell LISTSERV that your database even
exists (the DATABASE FILE file).
 
In other words, this is not something a list owner can do without much
cooperation from the LISTSERV maintainer.
 
>I guess I'm thinking of the researcher who searches my list without
>bothering to get the filelist first, and comes up empty-handed.
 
When you put new items into your filelist you can post something on your
list which explains what these items are.  That way people doing searches
will find your postings which refer them to the filelist.
 
Bill Gruber
LISTSERV maintainer, City University of New York