[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Open-ILS email list archives - an unusual request

[Sharp, Chris]

Good morning, Evergreen Community folks,

Apologies for the long-winded email here.

I co-administer the Open-ILS lists and I received a request from a former list member to delete an archived message.  This particular person discovered that a Google search of her/his name brings up an archived Open-ILS-General message from nearly a year ago and the person has requested that I (as a list administrator) approve the deletion of the email (and presumably a single response to it).  In particular, this person is concerned with the archive at mail-archive.com, which is one of two sites that archive our mail lists (that I'm aware of - the other is markmail.org), and I have no idea how many other ways our messages are propagated throughout the web.

Incidentally, the message in question is a request for information about how to unsubscribe from the list and contains only the person's full name (no other identifying information).  There was a single response to the message in which a helpful community member provided guidance for unsubscribing.

I initially responded to the person that this is just one of the risks of posting to a publicly archived list and that there is nothing we can do to prevent our archive from appearing in Google search results.  He responded that he was not aware that we publicly archive and would not have posted a message if he had known.  He has also contacted mail-archive.com, who have told him that they can delete the archived message from their site with my (our) permission.  This is why I'm turning to the larger community for input about this.

1) My first concern is whether it should be obvious that the Open-ILS lists are "public", that that it's obvious what "public" means.  In our case it means that whatever you send to our lists is received by all list subscribers and is archived on our web server, then propagated to other sites like mail-archive.com and markmail.org, which are in turn searchable via Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.  This is not explicitly said anywhere on our web site, on the subscription page(s), or in the welcome messages sent to new subscribers.  The closest I can find is on the Mailing List page at http://evergreen-ils.org/listserv.php where it says "There are five public mailing lists for people interested in Evergreen open source library software."  I have no idea whether even this verbiage was present when this person subscribed given the organic nature of our site.  I intend to add this sort of wording to the appropriate places in hopes of preventing future confusion of this sort.  I welcome everyone's input about this, including wording suggestions.

2) Secondly, unless there are other cases like this where email list postings have been manually removed (and I'm not aware of any), we currently have a complete archive of all the communications so far in the Evergreen-ILS project and I am extremely wary of editing the archives, for any reason.  That said, the subjective value of this particular thread is probably not useful to our history and constitutes what is known as "administrivia", something that the Mailman program itself tries to catch before it sends to the full list since it has more to do with list administration than useful content.  More importantly than this particular case, I'm concerned about where we draw the line on this.  What if I decided to leave the Evergreen community and would like all of my posts removed?  I would assume that I'm stuck with having them archived for perpetuity.  I don't want to set a precedent for micro-managing our email (or chat) archives.

So, do I (we) approve the deletion of the thread in question, possibly corrupting a complete archive of Evergreen's email history, but respecting this privacy concern?  Or do I (we) apologetically say that we want to keep a complete archive of list emails and will do our best in the future to communicate better about the "public" nature of our lists?

It may look like I'm overthinking this, but I do not feel that I'm empowered to make this decision alone - thanks for bearing with me!

Chris

-- 
Chris Sharp
PINES Program Manager
Georgia Public Library Service
1800 Century Place, Suite 150
Atlanta, Georgia 30345
(404) 235-7147
csharp at georgialibraries.org
http://pines.georgialibraries.org/