Liblicense-l: From the Moderator #1 (longish)

[Ann Okerson <ann.okerson@yale.edu>]

Dear Listmembers, 
 
This month, liblicense-l celebrates its 8th anniversary of existence and
has seen about 7300 messages pass through its electronic doorways. This is
a marvelous and sustained achievement, and thanks are due to our nearly
3,000 subscribers world wide, as well as Yale's hosting and support
services.

Recent conversations on- and off-list suggest that it would be useful to
remind us all that this list exists to further discussion in certain areas
and that it is a *moderated* list, which means that from time to time I
may exercise some discretion in what to send through and what to leave
unsent.  My philosophy is that moderators want to be very tolerant, and I
want to be sure that I am not censoring views as such; that said, limits
are useful.

In the next message, I'll enclosed the newly revised, i.e., the current,
introductory message that now goes with the automatic message greeting new
subscribers receive on signing up.  It outlines the themes and areas that
are central to this conversation.  Those themes have broadened over the
list's 8 years of existence from licensing alone, to include larger topics
of scholarly publication and communication, new ideas and models in this
area, including business, sustainability, long-term access, new
activities, and much more.  

I.e., the list is no longer only about licensing (though it arises out of
the access and business concerns that licensing has raised for us all).  
It is also not *only* about pricing, or open access, though lately the
list has seen much discourse about the latter, as a new and important
aspect of scholarly publication.  I've been asked about the list's (or my)
position about several of these areas, "pro" or "anti."  The answer is
that I'm genuinely curious about new developments and learn a great deal
from diverse, factual, or well-informed, or thoughtful discussion and aim
to extend the forum for such learning as broadly as possible.

Meanwhile, here are some things to do if you want to make sure we don't
neglect to pass your message on to the list:

* Be brief, be to the point, and keep in mind the main themes of the list.

* Not every message needs an answer; for those with many responses, bundle
them rather than sending multiple frequent messages.

* Listproc has quotas and so, for example, particularly long messages of
multiple screens cause it to go into distressful hiccupping spasms.  If
your message is particularly long, think about sending a screen or so of
summary and directing readers to a URL for the full text.

* Posting to more than one list at a time the same can be useful or it can
be redundantly annoying (or points in between).  Please use -- or continue
to use -- "this message is cross-posted" when you are sending to multiple
lists. Knowing this may help in deciding about inclusion.

* Agreement with other posters or support for their arguments is
especially effective when brief, and even at that runs the risk of boring
friend and foe alike with repetition.  To put it another way, repetition
is not the soul of wit.  Or, one might say, saying the same thing over and
over again is tiresome.

* Conversely, disagreeableness in itself is unattractive and
inappropriate.  Bad manners make a moderator reach for the delete key and
wish she could have a little chat with the poster's mother. She may choose 
to write to you before sending the message along to the list.

* Fresh, original remarks, studies, or other postings that shed light on
old themes or open new themes are specially welcome.

* I regularly exercise discretion about when to pass along what are or
appear to be commercial announcements.  This is not a place to advertise
products for sale, but when I think a broad range of readers will find a
message informative or interesting, commercial enthusiasm will appear
(perhaps edited down a bit).

* Technically:  Listproc is not a particularly intelligent software and
Yale is gradually migrating its lists away from it.  Whatever and whenever
the new software, we are mindful that the subscribership of this list is
global; it reaches many many people in many countries (and postings may be
translated into various languages at different times). Thus, for the
foreseeable future, messages will be sent out as "plain text" (ASCII) and
must be received in this way for most effective distribution.  Over the
last year, increasingly messages are coming to the moderator's queue as
attachments (which are likely to be received as nonsense characters) or
heavily tagged and encoded (sometimes I can take out the tags and coding
character by character or line by line; other times it just takes too long
or can't be done), or not infrequently in two versions, one with light
tagging (tagging that I need to remove) and the other unreadable (and I
have to delete that entire part).

	So, please set your mailers to send to liblicense-l and any other
	listproc lists ONLY a plain text version.  This will help
	enormously!

It is a consistent and regular pleasure to participate and nudge along
this conversation.  When prestigious national sources publish articles
that seem to have been researched by phoning up the liblicense
contributors to a thread on the topic under review, I'm always a little
pleased and amused at the implicit compliment to all of us.  But it is the
sense of the whole community of the list that this conversation is worth
having that keeps me going, and keeps me (very occasionally) deleting.

With thanks for your patience and only slightly belated new year's
greetings to all,

Ann Okerson, Moderator
Yale University Library
http://www.library.yale.edu/~okerson