Sending following again; original came defective. ========== --------------------- Forwarded message: Subj: Testing this piece of mail Date: 94-10-01 15:47:23 EDT From: [log in to unmask] To: Robt Baron Responding to msg by [log in to unmask] (Charles Desmarais) who states: >I also find the cute jokes, poems, etc. to be unnecessary and inappropriate >to a professional forum. Send them to your friends, or join one of those silly >chat forums on Compuserve, etc. Charles Desmarais takes the mission of listserv mail groups much too seriously. I believe that the great service that museum-l supplies is more akin to a magazine that has been crafted to serve the varying and multifarious needs of many people interested in museum topics. Certainly serious subject are discussed. But there are all kinds of serious discussions. Some may concern contemporary issues, others may be about techniques and procedures. I needn't belabor the point here; the proof is in the wide range of topics found in museum-l. There is even room for humor (indeed it is often needed)! Poetry too is useful if it makes a point. (A bit of self interest here.) Personals of a sort can be tolerated: "looking for information on;" "help me find so-and-so." The only area in which I agree with Mr. Desmarais is in the area of obviously personal communication that should be addressed to individuals. And of course the requests for maintenance of one's museum-l account; that too has no place, except when it appears through ignorance or exasperation. Wrongly addressed missives may however be partly attributed to the pecularities of mailing programs used. Some will automatically address a response to the museum-l list, while others pick out the address of the individual contributer. If contributers were to sign their contributions with their name and electronic address, that, I'm sure would help some. In the beginning, when I first joined this list I was downloading the mailing in batch mode. I found that it was a really simple matter to go through the batch (sometimes over 100k large) with a wordprocessor, search the threads, save the items I wanted to keep, and then delete the entire batch. This procedures worked quite effortlessly and resulted in my reading only about ten-percent of the notices. Perhaps those who find the list too crowded could change their retrieval method. Robert Baron [log in to unmask] [log in to unmask] [log in to unmask] Robert A. Baron, Museum Computer Consultant P.O. Box 93, Larchmont, NY 10538 [log in to unmask]; [log in to unmask]; [log in to unmask] ----------------------- Headers ------------------------ >From [log in to unmask] Sat Oct 1 15:46:27 1994 Received: from pipeline.com by mailgate.prod.aol.net with SMTP (1.37.109.4/16.2) id AA22357; Sat, 1 Oct 94 15:46:27 -0400 Return-Path: <[log in to unmask]> Received: from pipe1.pipeline.com (pipe1 [198.80.32.41]) by pipeline.com (8.6.9/8.6.9) with ESMTP id PAA23746 for <[log in to unmask]>; Sat, 1 Oct 1994 15:46:03 -0400 From: "Robert A. Baron" <[log in to unmask]> Received: (rabaron@localhost) by pipe1.pipeline.com (8.6.9/8.6.9) id PAA21117; Sat, 1 Oct 1994 15:46:01 -0400 Date: Sat, 1 Oct 1994 15:46:01 -0400 Message-Id: <[log in to unmask]> To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Testing this piece of mail AOL-Member: robtbaron