The following is an archived copy of a message sent to a Discussion List run by the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq.
Views expressed in this archived message are those of the author, not of the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq.
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Dear soc-casi-discuss subscriber, As many of you know, all messages distributed on this email list are archived on the World Wide Web (the archive is accessible via http://www.cam.ac.uk/societies/casi/discuss.html ). The archive is browsable by the public and features a search engine, making it quite a useful research tool. For technical reasons which I won't go into, CASI now faces a decision about where to host the list archive in the future. After some considerable research, the basic options which CASI faces (which maintain the entire archive in one place and offer good search abilities) are: 1) Host the archive on (and transfer the past archives to) a third-party automatic list-archiving web site (e.g. www.mail-archive.com). This would be free, but CASI would have absolutely no ability to remove articles from the archive or modify them. 2) Continue to host the archives ourselves, at a cost of roughly 5 pounds per month, i.e. 60 pounds (roughly US$100, I guess) a year. We would maintain complete control over the archive, including the ability to edit/remove posts. [If anyone can provide us with a reliable unix/linux server with a permanent internet connection on which we can host the archives for less than this, please let me know!] So the basic choice we have is whether it's worth paying 60 pounds a year for the ability to edit the archives. The main reasons why editing the archive is potentially desirable are: * if someone (perhaps accidentally) posts something they really really didn't mean to make public, or which is libellous, we could remove it from the archive * if a message turns out to be very misleading, at a later date we can add a note to it pointing out the error. For example, I added a note to the recent post about the Nobel Peace Prize winners, explaining that it had transpired to be inaccurate and pointing viewers to corrections posted to the list later. This increases the value of the list archive as a research tool, since there is less likelihood of a very misleading message being mistaken for a reliable source by someone browsing the archives. In the past year, the archives have been edited maybe 2 or 3 times in this way. I should point out that is not the intention to correct all factually incorrect information - just the occassional article which we feel is sufficiently misleading to warrant a warning being placed next to it and a pointer given to later messages which are usually posted in correction (and which the viewer might not otherwise notice). To help CASI decide whether this 'editability' feature is worth 60 pounds per year of CASI's funds, I'd be grateful if you could send me (not the whole list, please) an email telling me what, if anything, you use the archives for, and whether you think 'editability' is valuable. If you think there are other options for the future of the archive which we should be considering, please let me know (again, please don't email the whole list about this). I will post a summary of all your responses to the list in due course, for the curious. Any comments/suggestions/questions about other aspects of the discussion list would be very welcome, too. I look forward to hearing your thoughts. best wishes, Seb, CASI ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Seb Wills saw27@cam.ac.uk Tel: 01223 363882 Clare College Cambridge CB2 1TL, UK. Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq: http://welcome.to/casi ---------------------------------------------------------------------- -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- This is a discussion list run by the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq For removal from list, email soc-casi-discuss-request@lists.cam.ac.uk Full details of CASI's various lists can be found on the CASI website: http://welcome.to/casi