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[bacardiandlime]

http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i40/40college2.0.htm

I am a member of several H-NET lists, although I have never given anything to their fundraising drives. I have found the lists a useful resources, where I have heard about conferences, read reviews, and followed discussions of research topics (I don't generally post).

This response, posted recently by a member of one of those lists, put a different perspective on the financial situation
http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-HistGeog&month=0905&week=c&msg=Qqf89HKeNZwCmv6pXCb33w&user=&pw=

I admit I was staggered when I read their financial statements linked to here.

It does raise (for me) issues about whether such things should be free, and with today's technology, does anyone need to be spending as much as H-NET apparently do to run such a service? The list editors are volunteers.

And if it is the case that list memberships are dwindling, asking for more money runs the risk of alienating those that remain.

In a practical sense, the H-NET style lists can be annoying: even in digest form, it is not generally possible to jump straight to the entry of interest, rather I have to scroll through lots of other stuff, and this is somewhat tedious. They are also sometimes slow: because moderators or editors have to process the posts, it can take several days for a message to reach the list. The immediacy of twitter and other options (like the CHE fora) has that advantage.

[daniel_von_flanagan]

I think major universities should maintain independent servers (and not contract out to commercial services like Google for email and web hosting), and I think that academic mailing lists should live on university servers.  Anything else raises questions about ownership of IP, freedom of discourse, and privacy issues.  Computing hardware is not a great expense, our football coach's salary could buy a new server for every R1 in the country. - DvF

[polly_mer]

Personally, I'm starting to get a little annoyed about the billion invitations to follow things on Twitter and join the friends of the X society on Facebook.  I already have too many things demanding my attention.  I don't see the benefit of having constant little bits of info from a dozen streams instead of having all the bits collected in a weekly or monthly update that I can scan in a few minutes for things that interest me.

On the other hand, one professional society to which I belong has floated the idea of establishing forums to continue discussions about presentations at the big meetings.  I'll try that out if it gets off the ground because I do like that kind of interface.  But right now, the loosely organized email lists in conjunction with the webpages and newsletters of professional societies work for me.

[barred_owl]

I second your annoyance at the constant invitations to twitter and FB, polly.  However, there is one professional society that I wish had a more up-to-date mode of communication with its members, especially regarding jobs and professional exchanges.  Right now, the society only posts job listings every other month via an online newsletter, for example.  I realize it's a huge task for the one person who manages the online newsletter, but geez--for the cost of membership in said society, you'd think they could advance into the 21st century, at least!

[husqvarna]

I must say that I missed the whole listserv thing... I'm a youngin', and it always struck me as somewhat old-fashioned.  I think that blogs handle these sorts of needs effectively- they can be readily tailored to the needs of those who use them, and they just strike me as generally more versatile.  Why someone would talk about twitter or facebook or some other social networking base for scholarly exchange, I'm not sure.  They don't seem very helpful to me.

DvF makes good points about concerns with commercial servers, but I'm not knowledgeable enough to comment very much on that... are listservs the sort of thing that really needs to be under a particular university's purview?  Blogs can be invitation-only by way of addressing any privacy questions.  What are the concerns about freedom of discourse?

[daniel_von_flanagan]

DvF makes good points about concerns with commercial servers, but I'm not knowledgeable enough to comment very much on that... are listservs the sort of thing that really needs to be under a particular university's purview?  Blogs can be invitation-only by way of addressing any privacy questions.  What are the concerns about freedom of discourse?

Whoever owns a listserver has control over all its information.  For example, if a listserver includes a discussion of human rights violation in a country where the listserver's host does business, and the country wants the discussion stopped or the poster's identity released, what happens?  Websites, blogs, and email accounts on commercial servers have all been shut down regularly for fairly arbitrary reasons. - DvF

[systeme_d_]

Personally, I'm starting to get a little annoyed about the billion invitations to follow things on Twitter and join the friends of the X society on Facebook.  I already have too many things demanding my attention.  I don't see the benefit of having constant little bits of info from a dozen streams instead of having all the bits collected in a weekly or monthly update that I can scan in a few minutes for things that interest me.

I am in complete agreement with the above. 

And I enjoy the four H-Net discussion lists to which I subscribe, and do not find them to be either overwhelming or intrusive.  They are excellent resources.


I do not follow any academic blogs.  I guess I am an ancient crone.

[larryc]

My career has tracked the rise (and now fall?) of H-NET pretty closely.

And H-NET has been a tremendous boon to me. Right out of grad school in history with a family to support I took a 4/4 teaching job at an open-admissions state college in the rural midwest. With few campus or travel resources, a heavy teaching load, no network of scholars in my field, and no expectation to publish, it was your classic black hole of a job--a place you go and no one ever hears of you again.

But I managed to stay in the game, and it was because of the H-NET listservs. I used the H-NET lists in my subfields to find people for conference panel proposals, test research ideas, make professional contacts for grants and such, and to keep my own name out there. I didn't become famous (and it isn't looking likely!) but to me H-NET was an absolute lifeline.

That said, H-NET never fulfilled its early (and perhaps unrealistic?) promise. A lot of us hoped that the H-NET lists would be places for scholarly conversations, the sort of exchange of ideas that happens across the lunch banquet table at the best academic conferences. This did sometimes occur, especially in the early days of H-NET. But by five years ago the lists had quieted down to become less discussion oriented and more like campus bulletin boards carrying academic announcements and the occasional bibliographic inquiry. Many lists seem to have faded away entirely as the traffic has moved to blogs, twitter, and other msocial networking sites with greater functionality.

Part of this might be a natural process, but at least part is due to the klunkiness of the H-NET software, which is a very 1980s legacy system with some patches. When you subscribe to a H-NET list you get a flurry of emails--1) a "Summary of resource utilization" ("CPU time: 0.004 sec Device I/O:  8," etc.), 2) a nine-item "Subscription Request Form" that you need to fill out and which includes such fields as "PLEASE WRITE A BRIEF PARAGRAPH ABOUT YOURSELF BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION: (Describing your research, teaching interests, or what you expect from the list, etc.)." and 3) a list of listserv commands ("2.) To unsubscribe, logon to the computer account from which you subscribed to the list, and send this message to listserv@h-net.msu.edu: SIGNOFF H-[listname]"). Though to be fair you can also go to the H-NET web portal to manage your subscriptions.

As bad as the user interface is, the administrative interface for the list moderators is light years worse. I once trained to a moderator (then I irresponsibly flaked out on actually doing it--sorry, H-NET!) and OMG the byzantine procedures, lopping off people's sig lines, knowing the right listserv commands, etc.

All that said, some of the H-NET lists, such as H-Public, are still interesting and useful places. I would love to see them continue, but to drop the H-NET software completely and use a free alternative via Google or someone. At the same time they should establish blogs and Twitter feeds for what were the lists.

[Ooops--probably I should stop here and convert this into a blog post.]

[doctor_torrseal]

I think major universities should maintain independent servers (and not contract out to commercial services like Google for email and web hosting), and I think that academic mailing lists should live on university servers.  Anything else raises questions about ownership of IP, freedom of discourse, and privacy issues.  Computing hardware is not a great expense, our football coach's salary could buy a new server for every R1 in the country. - DvF

I think that too, but I also think that it's increasingly hard to afford.  It's not so much the hardware as the people to keep it running.  Few universities are willing to cut the football coach's pay to hire good IT staff.

I work for a hard science department that is a large research unit of a large U.  Departments like mine were early adopters of computing, workstations on each desk, email, web, and so on.  For years, we have run our own email systems.  We just had to give that up, so now we will have whatever email service the university provides.  Fortunately, now that IMAP is more or less standard for clients and servers, most users will see little effect.  But it does mean, for example, that we can't host our own internal lists and email aliases anymore - we have to get the university IT to do it for us, and follow their rules about what is or isn't allowed. 

Why did this change happen?  Well, we had an entire server farm of recently-retired workstations running just to do our spam filtering.  The cost of the computers was small (since they were gotten for free when a user upgraded or left) but it was taking almost an entire FTE of our internal IT staff to maintain the spam filtering software and the farm.  With budget cuts we can barely afford any IT staff at all, and this was no longer tenable.  Our email and web are reliable, but many people in my field have less-reliable university IT and have gone over to using Gmail for much of their work email.  (I forward all my work email to Gmail as a backup, searchability, and for convenience when traveling.)

Our services are now run within the university, so not outsourced yet.  But the U may go over to having Google provide some internal services like calendars (vs whatever proprietary software the U uses now) and I can see that in the next budget crisis, it may be tempting for them to just hire Google to provide our email.

When the Internet was much smaller, we did things a certain way.  Now it is much larger and more commercial and we can't run things like we did in 1993.  We have become victims of its success.

[bacardiandlime]

I agree with what LarryC said about H-NET's failings, although as I said I have found them useful, the level of academic discussion varies between the lists. The time-lag element I mentioned earlier is a factor in slowing down (killing?) a lot of 'conversation' unfortunately. One of the H-NET advantages however is people participating under their own names: no spam or timewaster trolls as you get on blogs (or indeed the CHE fora).
However, if the discussion has moved to blogs, that's more difficult to track. I do follow several academic blogs, but I also know how hard it is for any of them to gain traction: I am not aware of any blog that is the "go-to" site for discussion in a particular area. And of course, in most cases the blog is the site of one individual, who therefore is the dominant voice, and the conversation is what goes on in the comments section. This is pretty limited.
Other sites (for historians) such as HNN don't really seem as useful as they could be unfortunately. They contain some interesting things, but there isn't much of a conversational back-and-forth.

[daniel_von_flanagan]

I think that too, but I also think that it's increasingly hard to afford.  It's not so much the hardware as the people to keep it running. 

Cost of doing business.

My university brings in something like half a billion dollars in Federal grants, some fraction of which is overhead.  This is part of what that overhead should pay for.

I already block all gmail from my inbox, and make my students communicate with me using their university accounts.  If my university moves to a snoopy commercial server like the Google I'll simply stop using the internet for university business. - DvF

[carebearstare]

Echoing what a few people said above, I hate having to go to Facebook for scholarly updates, and refuse to join Twitter. I would much prefer regular updates that I can scan when is convenient for me rather than feeling as though I need to constantly be searching for things, and am missing out if I'm not online. My hope is that this way of interacting with information will die down and something more customizable will arise in its place.

Blogs would be better--at least they're more easily digested--but because they are run by individuals I find they tend not to be comprehensive, and sometimes aren't kept up to date if that person becomes busy. The nice thing about a listserv is that all members can contribute. Some of the fancier listservs created in HTML do allow you to click on particular subsections, if not specific entries.

[polly_mer]

As bad as the user interface is, the administrative interface for the list moderators is light years worse. I once trained to a moderator (then I irresponsibly flaked out on actually doing it--sorry, H-NET!) and OMG the byzantine procedures, lopping off people's sig lines, knowing the right listserv commands, etc.

All that said, some of the H-NET lists, such as H-Public, are still interesting and useful places. I would love to see them continue, but to drop the H-NET software completely and use a free alternative via Google or someone. At the same time they should establish blogs and Twitter feeds for what were the lists.

What's striking to me is that I subscribe to a few listservs that are specifically for discussion that have no moderators and they work fine*.  Sign up using a valid email, choose whether to get every message as it comes in or a daily automated digest version, and you're set.  We don't have trolls.  We have very little random spam, although sometimes a senior member must step in to inform a newbie of expected community behavior.  On the other hand, those lists are reasonably small (50 to 2000 people), and, like these fora, have only a small percentage of the subscribed people posting with a great many more just reading.

Of course, I have zero experience with H-NET, but I wonder if the primary problem is the attempt to impose unnecessary order and control on discussion rather than the technology involved.  I'm amused by the description of needing to cut people's sig lines.  Who cares?  Just scroll past.  An automated program can just cat together all of the emails that came in during the past X hours, put a list of the headers at the top, and ship it out.  Why should a person waste time doing that?  Use the technology available in appropriate ways and life is easier all around.

*For a given value of fine that involves strong feelings about specific research methods and tools when clueless newbies ask silly questions and an open mind about the mastery of English by graduate students in foreign countries.

[husqvarna]

Blogs would be better--at least they're more easily digested--but because they are run by individuals I find they tend not to be comprehensive, and sometimes aren't kept up to date if that person becomes busy. The nice thing about a listserv is that all members can contribute. Some of the fancier listservs created in HTML do allow you to click on particular subsections, if not specific entries.

I think the best academic blogs, with some rare exceptions, tend to be those that have 5-20 authors.  It's easy enough, however, to subscribe to dozens of single-author blogs and simply skim through your updates to see what's useful, not bothering to check back and see whether any particular Joe Blogger is still on vacation or is back to posting.

[larryc]

Of course, I have zero experience with H-NET, but I wonder if the primary problem is the attempt to impose unnecessary order and control on discussion rather than the technology involved.

Absolutely.