[ARSCLIST] The case for message boards.

[Brandon Burke <burke@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

With all due respect:

There are entirely too many people on this list to justify the amount
of three and four person conversations posted daily... to all of us.

At last May's meeting i talked to several people -- people who actually
attend the meetings -- that have either quit the list or simply  
ignore it now.
This is bad, for a number of reasons, and i cannot help but think  
that it is
the result of ARSClist functioning through email since -- and  
understandably
so -  it is very easy to forget that each and every post is sent to  
hundreds of people.

My contention is that too many of these conversations are indeed that -
*conversations* between only a handful of people - and not something
appropriate for mass distribution. Here a message board would come in
handy as i would no longer be the recipient forty messages a day, the
majority of which are of little interest to me professionally.

Secondly, and to the point about klunky interfaces, it is my opinion  
that
message boards are infinitely easier to navigate when searching for old
messages/topics. If i were interested in messages regarding  
copyright, i could
go to the [Copyright] section. Likewise, for other issues:  
preservation, engineering,
cataloging, discography. Instead, and as it stands now, a search  
among the
ARSClist archives results in a list of messages about which context is a
near-mystery, since it is possible for any one message to have  
several replies,
none of which are linked. Add to this the fact that search queries  
(currently) produce
results only at the message level - rather than entire threads, with  
all posts
in chronological order - and you have nothing short of a complete mess.

(Have you ever tried to print an entire ARSClist thread in  
chronological order??)

The question becomes: is this list a country club or are we providing  
a service
for the sound collections community? I'm of the opinion that it is  
the latter.

thanks and happy friday,
Brandon


____________________________________
Brandon Burke
Archivist for Audio Collections
Hoover Institution Archives
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-6010
vox: 650.724.9711
fax: 650.725.3445
email: burke@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx