This column is a continuing feature of Benchmarks intended to present news and information on various aspects of wide area networks.
Electronic mailing lists are still among
the most popular of Internet services. Their numbers are continually
on the increase which makes it more likely that there is a discussion
list that you might be interested in, but less likely that you ll be
able to find it. Fortunately, there are some new services that can help
solve this problem. Several World Wide Web pages and Gopher sites are
now available to search for electronic mailing list citations and
browse their descriptions.
Mailing
lists have been popular since the old BITNET days (ancient history, by
computer standards) as a way to exchange information with others that
share the same interest or profession. When there were only several
hundred mailing lists, they were quite easy to find and to access. Now
there are many thousands of these on- line discussion lists and
finding one on a particular topic can be a daunting task. It is possible
to get a list of all LISTSERV mailing lists by sending E-mail to any
LISTSERV installation (like listserv@utarlvm1.uta.edu), with the
command LIST GLOBAL as the body of the message. What you will get,
however, is a 20,000-plus line file that itemizes over 6000 different
lists. You can narrow this down by sending the command LIST GLOBAL
/topic, where you replace topic with whatever word or string which
reflects a subject that interests you. The downside to this technique,
is that you receive very minimal information about the mailing list
and browsing through the long listing can sometimes be quite tedious.
There are several World Wide
Web pages that can help you find or quickly browse through collections
of electronic mailing list citations. You can visit these by using a
Web browser like Netscape or NCSA Mosaic. In Netscape, for example,
use the 'Open Location menu item to point your browser at the sites
mentioned below.
http://www.netspace.org/cgi-bin/lwgate/ is a page that provides an
interactive interface to the LISTSERV that is installed at the
Internet site, netscape.org. This LISTSERV maintains quite a few lists
of it s own and you can browse through the list and even subscribe
through this WWW service. The Web-based subscription process is
limited, however, to only those lists on the netscape LISTSERV. Another
service of Netscape, however, is to allow you to get a list of
LISTSERV lists mailed to you. The item, Search for Other Mailing
Lists lets you request that a complete list of lists or a list narrowed
by a substring search be mailed to you at a specified E-mail address.
This page also points to documentation for using the popular mailing
list software packages under the heading, "Info on Mailing List
Software."
A more
global collection of LISTSERV mailing list citations is found at
http://www.tile.net/tile/listserv/.
You can see lists of mailing lists grouped by number of subscribers,
first letter of the list name, archive policy, country of list origin,
list membership policy, list server name or the sponsoring organization
of the mailing list. You can also look at a complete collection sorted
in a couple of different ways: by list description, by list name, or
by the number of list subscribers. These are long listings, however, so
you might want to browse the different groupings before selecting any
of the sorted lists. Another feature of this Web page is the ability
to do a keyword search on the collection of mailing list citations. You
ll find this to be a much quicker way to explore the breadth of
LISTSERV mailing lists than the traditional E-mail LIST GLOBAL query.
For quite some time, one
resource that s been available to find mailing lists has been a grouping
of scholarly electronic mailing lists organized by subject. This
collection, compiled by Diane Kovaks at Kent
State University, was previously only available as a series of
computer files. It has now come to the Web at the location:
http://www.mid.net:80/KOVACS/.
You can also access it via Gopher at the address, gopher://gopher.mid.net:7002. (You can use your Gopher client to
see this information by pointing to gopher.mid.net using the port number
7002.) The Web page lets you view hierarchical lists of mailing list
citations organized by subject or by alphabet. You can also search the
collection by subject, keyword, list name, and other associated
information.
Electronic
journals and magazines have been around almost as long as electronic
mailing lists. One Web-accessible collection of these can be found at
the site, http://www.csi.uottawa.ca/info/mags.html.
If you browse this page, you ll find references to other on-line lists
as well as a few direct references to on-line journals. By following
some of these paths, you can access copies of some of the electronic
publications.
As the
World Wide Web becomes more extensive, it is becoming a tool to organize
a lot of information that has preexisted it on BITNET and the
Internet. By knowing a few key references like those above, we can
benefit from this new technology in order to access a more established
information service. As more of these services are indexed by various
Web sites, your access to information can only get easier to accomplish.
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