On 3/15/07, Mark Myers <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>
> Has any body else dealt with this from a scheduling standpoint.  I do want to make clear that I am talking about the archives of the listserv, not the individual postings that subscribers receive.  The last time I posted about this issue, there was some confusion about that.

on the archivist listserv one poster pointed out that there is a
limitation with listserv software. You are unable to delete individual
messages, if you want to do that you must delete an entire week's
worth of message. IIRC you can delete it an individual message only IF
it is the first message of the week and no other message has been
posted after it.

What I see here is a problem of trying to apply physical records
retention rules to a digital environment. In a physical world the
retention for something like a listserv would be very short-term due
to the transitory nature of the information, the vast noise to signal
ratio and finally the difficulty of locating key information amongst
thousands of individual physical messages if the listserv were
conducted using physical mail. A good retention schedule would say
that a sampling of the physical messages (say 1-5% ) should be
retained for archival purposes to document how the list was used by
the participants. Then one would need to determine how to do the
sampling, random, ever 100th message? every thousandth message?

But an electronic environment turns the schedule on its head since you
now have the ability via a search engine (either something like google
or the listserv native search function) that allows you to search
listserv archives ignoring the detritus and locating the information
you seek. plus since it is web-based the user can bookmark the message
they have located, print it out or capture it in pdf format.

this whole issue is turning out to be a PR nightmare for SAA.
-- 
Peter Kurilecz CRM CA
Richmond, Va

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