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

Tue Apr 5 10:09:16 EDT 2011

Hi,

On Apr 5, 2011, at 9:22 AM, Sharp, Chris wrote:
> 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.

We can certainly add more text to the welcome message and the signup page to emphasize that the mailing lists are public, can be archived on multiple websites, and can show up on web searches.  E.g.,

"The Evergreen mailing lists are public and publicly archived.  Posts to the lists can show up on external mailing lists archives such as http://mail-archive.com as well as general search engines such as Google."

We could also link directly to the mailing lists archives from http://evergreen-ils.org/listserver.php to make it more clear.

And, to state the obvious, public mailing lists is one of the things that distinguish the open source ILS communities from some of their proprietary kin -- you don't need to sign a contract to join the user's community.

> 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?

Well, regardless of what we do, we can make no guarantee to the individual concerned that removing the message from our archive will cause it to be removed from other archives or web search engines.

My preference is that we adopt a policy of leaving the archives alone except in really exceptional cases.  Certainly I'd see no value in letting somebody repudiate a long posting history; where the line gets fuzzier is in the case of one-offs.  As you describe the request you received, I can't say that I understand why it is such a big deal for that person.  On the other hand, I can envision scenarios where it might matter, having worked with librarians who were loath to prematurely reveal that they were considering or implementing Evergreen.  I'd say that if somebody *promptly* requests a clawback of a post made in error and can demonstrate to one of the list admins that leaving the post in the archives would result in actual harm to the poster, that should be considered.  In the current situation of somebody waiting over a year to make this request, I don't think so.

Regards,

Galen
--
Galen Charlton
VP, Data Services
Equinox Software, Inc. / Your Library's Guide to Open Source
email:  gmc at esilibrary.com
direct: +1 352-215-7548
skype:  gmcharlt
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