Electronic "bulletins" access was for "free" services. Counterpoint and Infoed are 23 Jun 1995 17:58 EST
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. 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. We have a very comprehensive newsletter published 4 times annually (and indications from faculty that it's being read). So we don't intend to abandon the paper version, but possibly post the "lead" article to the Web and/or the TOC with instructions about how to order that issue if they're interested. 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 we have the same problem with people not checking their electronic sources as we do with mail sent the "old" way, 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 * ******************************************