🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <348a35$9fn@news.ycc.yale.edu>,
Una Smith <una@doliolum.biology.yale.edu> wrote, among other things:
 
>It also means more new readers, and thus possibly more traffic.

This is undoubtedly a _good_ thing (see below), although the prospect
has been creating some anxiety among discussants in the MUSEUM-L list.

>Moderating the newsgroup is a good way to control the negative
>aspects of wider availability.

Care to elaborate on negative aspects, beyond the obvious  --more volume,
more "crank and junk mail", more bounced mail (as you note below)?

>It requires some work, but usually not as much work
>as handling bounced mail from subscribers.

You mean "handling bounced mail" on a LISTSERV? Or, on a newsgroup?

>This assumes that the moderation is mostly automated.

Are you referring to moderation of a newsgroup or of a LISTSERV? I.e.,
at which of these places do the moderation tools exist (I know about
what can be done on LISTSERV; not about what can be done on a
newsgroup, both in the context of a gateway'd newsgroup (Jim McIntosh
tried to explain some aspects of gateway control, but I need to get more
clarification) and of a "pure" newsgroup).

>I'd recommend a more useful name than bit.listserv.museum-l (the
>conventional form);

bit.listserv doesn't contribute much to indicate the subject matter or
focus of this discussion group, I agree. But, perhaps "museum" (or
museum-l) does say it all (see below), and doesn't need to be further
"placed".

>bit.curation.museum perhaps, to make a 
>hierarchy where other related newsgroups could be added later.

I don't think the limits of the "museum" discussions are bounded by
"curation". Perhaps it would be easier to argue the other way around,
i.e., museum.curation, museum.xxx, etc. But, I believe that readers and
contributors to a museum discussion are not so lucky as to need to
worry about breaking down the topic into subtopics, even in the
foreseeable future; I think it would be a disservice, for some years
to come, to force a sorting of discussion topics into separate groups.
(There are already many, many other groups in existence, dealing with
computer information systems, images, academic disciplines (closely allied
to museums/collections), art/music, etc., in which Museum-L subscribers
can and do participate.)

>If the newsgroup were put in the "big 7", where should it go?

This question, raised by Jonathan Grobe as well, is challenging, and
digs deeper than was perhaps intended.

"Museum", as an enterprise, is science. But, it's also art, it's
education, it's business and management, it's information science and
service and peddling, it's a partner of most academic disciplines and many
other human activities (all of which create junk of some sort that
becomes artifacts in time, and coveted/studied/conserved/etc by museums).

"Museums" is lots of things to lots of people, and in browsing around
the major groups of newsgroups, I find it difficult to place it
objectively into any particular group (precisely because of its breadth
of scope), with perhaps the exception of "info." (It could be
artibrarily put into bit., alt., misc., but if that's the case, putting
it into bit. probably makes the most sense.)

Comments?
Peter Rauch