To Drew, on the posting of Mills archives

Drew,

In Digest Number 359, you wrote:
>I found that listproc@eartha.mills.edu sporadically *may* not respond at a
>certain time of day. But it will ultimately respond, and usually seems to
>work just fine.
>
>I will have it all up on the web soon anyhow.

It is one thing that we are able to access the old Mills College tuning
list archives. It is quite another to post them publicly on the web. I have
talked with Joe Monzo about this once before. Mailing lists such as the old
Mills list, while not entirely anonymous, are semi-private ways of having a
community. By taking items that were written with that intent and posting
them publicly, a number of serious issues are raised.

Some lists either don't want the archives made public at all, or want them
made available to the list members only. Other lists have raised the topic
before and for various reasons have asked that the archives never be made
public, and so nobody has. If there are *no* objections to making the
archives available on a web site somewhere, then I suppose it's OK.
However, it would seem that any one objection should be considered reason
enough to NOT publish them publicly.

There are also questions of spam harvesters, etc. that you need to be quite
concerned about. If you found unanimous support for publishing, the very
least one would expect is that the addresses, etc. have been scrubbed and
replaced with generic information, such as "Jonathan M. Szanto "
<*******@****.***> or something similar. I have no problems with someone
posting information on how to access the archives (maybe more detailed info
on Mark Nowitzky's page?) and even highlights of some of the digests.

Personally, I don't have a big problem with the *content* of those postings
ending up somewhere, but there are issues to ponder before you simply plop
them on a web site somewhere. It isn't too much to ask, I think, to
consider and respect the wishes of the people that contributed to the Mills
tuning list in these matters.

Respectfully,
Jon
`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`
Jonathan M. Szanto : Corporeal Meadows - Harry Partch, online.
jszanto@adnc.com : http://www.corporeal.com/
`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`