One more drop in the flood of meta-discussion.... As has been noted already, many of the current "growing-pains" of MUSEUM-L are caused by our large number of relatively inexperienced subscribers. We museum-folks have not been on the Net as long as the university community, and it shows. Fortunately, ignorance is a curable condition. Most people respond well to a polite, off-list message that points out their error and provides the information they need to prevent repeating it. I'm a listowner on three lists, one of them quite large. That list is run by a "listowners' council" of about a dozen people, who rotate active duty in two-week shifts. The listowner-on-duty (colloquially called the "Solomon-of-the-day" or SOD) handles error messages, replies to subscriber queries, posts informational notes to the list when required, composes polite (i.e. no "Have a nice day, moron") notes to the inadvertent net-sinners, and generally handles all matters that the LISTSERV program cannot. The listowners communicate through a private mailing list, which is the owner of the public list; this allows any member of the council to interact with the LISTSERV as listowner. If anyone is interested in the technical details, please contact me privately. We have found this arrangement to be very effective in communicating an atmosphere of competent civility to our subscribers, who now do an excellent job of policing list tone and content without much interference from the listowners. I believe that a similar arrangement would work well with MUSEUM-L. It is a lot of work, to be sure, but with multiple listowners the duties are not onerous, and one soon creates a nice library of boilerplate text to handle most situations. If Dr. Chadwick were to solicit volunteers to be co-listowners, he would soon have a large and enthusiastic committee of helpers. It has been suggested that Reply-To: be set to the individual rather than the list; in the case of a large, active list such as MUSEUM-L this is probably a good idea, but it will drive people using PROFS/ OfficeVision (with PUMP) -- a population that includes most of the Smithsonian subscribers -- to distraction, because our mailers will then ask us whether we want to register each and every separate address for possible reply. Other mailers may work the same way. This may not be an adequate reason to leave Reply-To: to the list at large, but it probably should be considered before that decision is made. There has been some discussion about splitting the list; given the size of the current subscribership, this is probably not a bad idea. I have seen an assertion that any electronic community of more than 200 people tends to split into separate groups. In my experience, this is accurate. Groups with similar interests tend to identify themselves and wander off to form new lists. This is not altogether a bad thing; people who share the interests of both groups can subscribe to both, while those who focus on only one aspect are not troubled with extra correspondence. My own sense is that we could support a separate "museum computerization" group (perhaps under the auspices of MCN?) and a Registrar's group dedicated to collection-related matters. We have already seen a partition of our audience with AAT-L, CIDOC-L, and the collection managers' list. Subject-specific lists such as AEROSP-L also deal with museum-related topics. Net-culture evolves rapidly, and part of Net-literacy is recognizing the nature of the virtual community. It may not be ideal, but it's what we have. And for those who learn to swim in its complex currents, it can be quite glorious. +------------------------------+------------------------+ | Barbara Weitbrecht | [log in to unmask] | | National Air & Space Museum | [log in to unmask] | | Smithsonian Institution | (202) 357-4162 | +------------------------------+------------------------+