[ARSCLIST] e-mail lists in general--was: email courtesy and apologies to Tom.

[Steven Barr <stevenc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Lou Judson" <loujudson@xxxxxxx>
> I am going off this list as I'm tired of the overly chattiness and 
> straying far afield of the topics... I am interested in archiving, and 
> people who know the history of the business, but don't have time for 
> this...
> 
> Bye. I have no hard feelings, too bad you do. Hope the moderators are 
> listening, if there are any. it is more a club than an informational 
> e-list!
> 
There is a moderator...but ARSCLIST is NOT a moderated list (for one
thing, no one has the time to donate!). The only way to have a 
"strictly business" e-mail list is to have a list on which EVERY
post has to be read and approved by the moderator before it is
posted to the list. However, I don't think a moderated list
would have avoided this issue...that would require someone who
could tell that an inadvertant deletion had more or less
placed someone's words in someone else's mouth, and the only
way to catch that sort of detail would require memorizing the
contents of each thread!

As well, "strictly business" lists have several drawbacks (aside
from their inevitable impersonality!). First (and foremost),
there is very seldom agreement on what the purpose of a list IS!
Should ARSCLIST (as an extension of Association of Recorded Sound
Collections) deal only with phonorecords? Or tape recordings (if
so, which formats?), or digital recordings, or cylinders, or...
For that matter, is that possibly too selective? What of sound
films (moving images included), or DVD's (ditto) or videotapes?
Or do we just limit our discussions of such to the audio data only?
And even if we limit our discussion strictly to recordings of
sound in any form, we immediately get into the inevitable debates
about which type(s) of sound are more important...classical vs.
vintage pop music vs. true folk music vs. country vs. blues vs.
rock vs. urban dance...and so forth.

Another thing we lose with a heavily controlled moderated list
is the element of "serendipity"...the occasions when someone
else posts a question, which is answered...and you realize you
had long wondered the same thing!

The equivalent of this type of controlled e-mail list would be
to have a staff at the coming ARSC convention tasked with ensuring
that any conversations be ONLY on "official" subjects...no pleasantries
exchanged, no personal questions, no jokes being told...and so on!

So...just accept the fact that e-mail lists...and e-mail in general...
suffers from one significant flaw! Sadly, our computers can't actually
speak to one another, so the intermediaries have to be human beings...
and humans are FAR from flawless in communication! Establish a system
where my computer can directly message another one, "I AM MISSING THE
DATA ON VICTOR 16661 - DO YOU HAVE IT?" to which the second machine
can reply either "NO" or "YES - DATA FOLLOWS..." No jokes, no
misunderstandings, no (in theory) errors...and no need for humans...

Steven C. Barr