This discussion is very timely regarding what we are doing at the
University of New Orleans.  We were late getting into the gopher game, so
last fall we made a strategic decision to just "skip" gopher & focus all
development on our UNO Web (http://www.uno.edu).  It has caught on like
wildfire, but that's not to say we don't have a lot of work yet to do (i.e.
15% of the faculty still don't have access, we need to "market" this better
as an information source, and we still need to do *considerable* training
for this to work properly).

The Office of Research was one of the first depts. to get their Web page
initiated.  Our strategy is as follows:  we will *not* send whole RFP's
electronically to "everybody" as a routine activity.  Our systems people feel
this is a tremendous drain on the technical specs of the e-mail system
(15,000 students & 500 faculty). I'm sure you've all had the experience of
trying to e-mail a downloaded document & being told the system was
"truncating at 30,000 characters, or so" cause it was too long.
Plus I don't think it's a good idea for other reasons.  We want to
establish an "interaction" with our office (I know that's probably naive
with some P.I.'s!).  If you send "everything" out to people, they don't
come to you to discuss further & you only find out at the very end of their
proposal development that there may be problems.

Eventually, we
hope to more systematically post *brief* announcements on the Web (plus I'm
still going to use a set of e-mail distribution lists (similar to what I
think Elizabeth was describing previously).  For instance I have a list of
people in physical sciences who get "environmental", social scientists who
get "environmental justice", that type of thing.  I might send out a
"distribution" just alerting them to look on the Web about some specific
announcement or something, but there as well they would still have to come
to us for "full details" (which I might still e-mail, but the idea is you
really can use that contact as a benchmark for  "who" is interested
in a particular RFP.

We have a pretty comprehensive newsletter (which we have indication to
believe people  *do* read) published 4 times a year.  We will continue the
paper version, and perhaps publish a "lead" article on the Web or maybe
display the table of contents, with directions about how to get the issue.
We can't abandon paper entirely because our campus is far from being ready
for this.

Our Web statistics tell us we're getting about 7,500 hits a week, 3,000 on
campus, 4,500 from elsewhere.  We have no ability at the moment to
distiguish between faculty/student hits, but that might be interesting as
well.

In summary, I think we have to view the movement to "electronic
information" carefully and strategically.  It's a definite necessity, but
we shouldn't lose sight of the major objective:  to get more people to
write more successful grants!  If they fail to check electronic info (the
same way they fail to read everything in their mailboxes) what have we
gained?

******************************************
*       Jane E. Prudhomme, Director      *
*       Research and Sponsored Programs  *
*       University of New Orleans        *
*       New Orleans, LA 70148            *
*       (504) 286-7154                   *
*       Internet: xxxxxx@uno.edu          *
*       Web Page:  www.uno.edu           *
******************************************