🚀 go-pugleaf

Register my vote against Gutenberg material on NETTRAIN.  I wish Mr.
Hart well in his endeavor to bring a zillion electronic texts to every
man, woman, and child (and most dogs and cats) on the planet, but it
has no defensible connection to the process of training people to use
the nets.

I think NETTRAIN, as a list, could (should?) learn from the lesson of
PACS-L.  PACS-L started with a fairly well-defined focus--incorporating
public access computer systems into library service--but found itself
incapable of turning away any subject which its subscribers considered
a Good Thing.  This has gradually made PACS-L the general, all-purpose
library list, with job postings for catalogers, criticisms of slow
software updates, announcements of almost every meeting at ALA
conferences, etc. etc.  And of course Project Gutenberg announcements.
All of these are arguably Good to have online somewhere, but it sure
makes PACS-L unreliable as a concise source of information regarding
public access computer systems.

If NETTRAIN similarly becomes unable to avoid a subject just because
one (or a few, or even many) subscribers want to discuss it--no matter
how far afield it is--then it becomes not only useless but redundantly
so.


Thomas Dowling
University of Washington Engineering Library
tdowling@u.washington.edu