[Air-L] Death to lists?

Terry Calhoun splendid at umich.edu
Mon Jun 29 06:18:13 PDT 2009


I have no hard and fast answer, Alex.

Noting first that this is not "scholarly" content, I have developed a strong
tendency in myself to want "more" than what an email list can give. For
example, I have managed the UWEBD list of college and university webmasters
since 2000, but a year ago I created a niche socal network for it -
cuwebd.ning.com - which is going gangbusters.

If I were beginning a new "list" today, I would look at that Ning technology
or something else with more archiving and social aspects than just a Lyris
list. Barriers to entry in such things are a little higher, but they are
richer.

It would be nice to be able to look ahead even 3 years to see what is most
successful, or even if there will be any resolution about the communications
technology that will work best for this kind of stuff.


On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 9:06 AM, Alex Halavais <alex at halavais.net> wrote:

> Chronicle has an article suggesting that the e-mail list is dead as a
> form of scholarly communication. It quotes (twoutes?) an ex-AIR-Ler,
> David Silver, :



> Am I wrong on this? The question isn't just about AIR-L. It's true,
> the number of lists I've been a subscriber to peaked in the late
> 1990s. It's also true that time I might have spent reading a list may
> now be channeled to reading other kinds of accumulations. But I think
> lists still have a lot of life in them. That is true of large lists
> like this one, but also much smaller efforts. Collaborations among
> distributed scholars still occur *mainly* over email and small email
> lists, no?




-- 

Terry Calhoun, MA, JD
Society for College and University Planning (SCUP)
terry.calhoun at scup.org | www.scup.org
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