Dear Colleagues,

 My initial reaction to NIH doing away with the email distribution of
 announcements was "oh great, one more time-consuming thing to do on
 the web" but if you look at what they're doing, it's very similar to
 what the National Science Foundation has just done.  You can get
 notification from NSF of new announcements (NIH has the TOC mail list)
 and then you go to the Web to get the announcement.  So NIH is
 basically following NSF's lead in doing this.

 My only big concern with this is that it will be offered on the web in
 only HTML language.  This is the language that makes it "pretty" on
 the web page but causes a lot of problems when trying to transfer it
 electronically to faculty.  It has to be cleaned up and sanitized of
 all the HTML coding in the document before it can be distributed to
 faculty.  It looks great printed on paper but not in print on your
 computer.  I also sent an email to NIH requesting that they please add
 an ASCII format file on the web page which will greatly simplify the
 process of saving the document in a word processing format and then
 distributing.  Our email system will only translate the ASCII which is
 a universal language.

     Marsha Green
     Sponsored Programs Coordinator
     University of Nevada Las Vegas
     xxxxxx@ccmail.nevada.edu